The Format war is over:

Blu-ray wins!!

It’s official, on Tuesday Toshiba announced they are withdrawing from the HD-DVD market. They will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD-DVD players and recorders. Toshiba will continue to provide support and after-sales service for all owners of HD-DVD products. They will wind down operations by the end of March 2008.

Shortly after Toshiba made the announcement, Universal Studio’s announced they have started preparations on Blu-ray discs; although no titles were given yet. Universal was the only studio to support HD-DVD from the start. It is welcome news that they have moved so quickly to support Blu-ray.

With Toshiba dropping HD-DVD and Universal announcing support; that leaves just Paramount the lone studio supporting HD-DVD. I am sure within the next few days they will announce support for Blu-ray. Paramount previously supported Blu-ray and even had titles which had been produced and manufactured, which they held back from retail when they switched to HD-DVD back in late August 2007. So it will be no problem for them to jump back into Blu-ray. While it may take longer for Universal to ramp up their Blu-ray production.

Now that there is only one High-Def format, the focus can change from fighting HD-DVD to spreading the news about Blu-ray. As I mentioned in my previous entry; Blu-ray faces an uphill battles against standard definition DVD, High-def downloads, awareness/education and price. The cost of Blu-ray hardware and software is not on the same level as DVD. It will take a lot of marketing and price reductions to get Blu-ray to become appealing for the masses.

Work also needs to be done to work out the kinks of Blu-ray. Beside the specification issues - Profile 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 players. They are still many issues with the BD-Java implementation, which drives the interactivity of Blu-ray. If Blu-ray is to become mainstream, it cannot expect users to download firmware updates, burn it to a CD and load the CD to install the firmware. This really needs to be addressed and hopefully over the course of the year with the introduction of full specification 2.0 players they will be.

Before ending I must give kudos to Toshiba and HD-DVD. In April 2006 they introduced a player with full functionality – Picture in Picture functionality, Internet connectivity and on-board decoding on audio codec’s. Blu-ray was not ready to enter the market and it forced the Blu-ray group to release (June 2006) earlier than expected, that’s why there is all the different specifications for Blu-ray. HD-DVD included advanced video codec’s such as AVC and VC-1 as part of their specification. This forced Blu-ray to include it as well, which was not part of the original Blu-ray spec, MPEG 2 was. The first Blu-ray releases tended to be MPEG-2 video and the quality was not great. It was because of HD-DVD that Blu-ray picture quality got better, interactivity increased and hardware prices fell.

Toshiba had a great machine, which provided more or less the same video quality as Blu-ray. But Blu-ray was able to convince the content providers to go Blu, because of security measures and more disc space. In the end 4 things won the war.

1. The Trojan horse of the PS3, which included a Blu-ray drive capable of playing DVDs, Blu-ray movies and PS3 Blu-ray games.
2. The exclusive content of Disney, Fox, Warner Bros and Sony movie studios.
3. The retailers in the United States put their weight behind Blu-ray. Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target, Blockbuster and NetFlix all decided to support Blu.
4. Sony learned from its Betamax defeat and created a consortium of all the major electronic and computer companies – Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp, LG, Phillips, Apple, Dell, HP and cut them in for a piece of the action.

Whereas HD-DVD just had Toshiba on the electronics side and Microsoft, Intel and HP on the computer side. LG and Samsung made dual (HD-DVD/Blu-ray) players, but they were much more expensive than a standalone HD-DVD player.

The High-Def format war is over; all I hope for now is that Blu-ray become mainstream over the next couple of years. So I can rent Blu-ray discs at my local video store or buy at a reasonable price to enjoy on my High Definition TV or projector. Not that I have one now, but hopefully in the next few years I will.

But I don’t expect Blu-ray to be as popular as DVD. DVD has only been around for 11 years and really only experienced massive growth within the last 8-9 years. If Blu-ray is half as successful as DVD I will be happy.