 When we last saw our intrepid hero, DVD, in 2002 or so, it had risen in just five short years to become the undisputed king of all physical distribution formats. VHS had gone the way of the Old Republic, and tapes were relegated to the closeout bin and garage sales. Falling prices and rapidly-improving technology was fueling consumer demand for High Definition (“HD”) televisions, and consumer  electronics manufacturers were racing to develop a new physical distribution format capable of storing the vast amount of data required by HD. UCSB professor and Millennium Technology Prize Laureate Shuji Nakamura had made this possible with his invention of the blue LASER diode.
A Line in the Sand
 Sony began working with Pioneer on a project called DVR Blue, which in February of 2002 became “Blu-ray” after Nakamura’s blue LASER. Toshiba and NEC had also partnered to develop a new Hi-Def disc, and in August of 2002 and announced their format, Advanced Optical Disc. This format that was adopted by the DVD Forum and re-named “HD DVD” in 2003.
The Blu-ray Disc Association, a group of electronics manufacturers and movie studios (keep in mind, Sony is both), split from the DVD Forum. This leaves us with Sony and Pioneer leading the Blu-ray camp on one side, and Toshiba, NEC, and Microsoft leading the charge for HD DVD on the other.
The PC Connection
Since becoming involved in the development of DVD years earlier, PC industry players including Microsoft had become key in the advancement and adoption of new consumer electronics technologies—for obvious reasons, people want technologies that are compatible with both the Audio/Visual (“A/V”) systems in their living rooms AND their computers. While both HD DVD and Blu-ray employed blue LASER diodes and were capable of storing huge  quantities of data, there were several differences between the two formats that rendered them incompatible. Among them, the Blu-ray camp favored using a Java-based platform for interactivity (BD-J), while the DVD Forum was promoting Microsoft's "iHD" (which became HDi). As some of you may know, Microsoft stopped embedding support for Sun Microsystem’s Java into Windows XP several years ago, and still then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates proclaimed that the Blu-ray standard had to change to "work more smoothly with personal computers". Interesting. One has to wonder what effect Gates’ distaste for Java might have on the outcome of the coming battle.
No Deal
The events that followed were extremely complex, subject to much speculation, and rife with corporate in-fighting, and political intrigue, but the Reader’s Digest version is that the Blu-ray Disc Association and DVD Forum (HD DVD) could not work out their differences and come to a compromise for a single, converged standard. HD DVD players and movies were released in the United States on April 18, 2006. The first Blu-ray Disc titles were released on June 20, 2006 and the first movies using 50GB dual layer discs were introduced in October 2006.1 The format war was on.
Choosing Sides
In any campaign, military, political, or in business, the strength and quality of strategic alliances can mean the difference between victory and defeat. Computer and electronics manufacturers as well as content producers (e.g., movie studios) were lining up on both sides of the Blu-ray v. HD DVD battle.
Pay-for-Play
Reminiscent of the payola scandal of the early 1960’s, a LOT of money began to change hands, mostly between the competing Hi-Def disc camps and various movie studios in exchange for exclusive support for one format on the other. Small change, however, compared to the future potential market. Content is king, though, and both camps knew that no one would buy their players, no matter how good it they were, if the movies they wanted wouldn’t play on them.
The PS3 Advantage and The WB
 Sony had a leg up on most of the members of the rival DVD Forum: the PlayStation 3 (“PS3”). Released just in time for the holidays in 2006, the eagerly-awaited and long-anticipated seventh-generation video game console had a Blu-ray player built into every unit. During the holiday season of 2007, major price cuts to HD DVD players seemed to bolster the struggling format and give it a new lease on life. On January 4, 2008, however, Warner Brothers, with the largest market share of DVD titles, withdrew its support for the HD DVD format entirely, setting in motion a domino effect of former HD DVD allies changing sides.
 And the Winner Is…
In a word: Sony. By the time Toshiba ceded the market in February, about 10.5 million of the Sony consoles had sold versus an estimated 1 million HD DVD players – including both standalone units and the add-on player for Microsoft's Xbox 360 console.2
The War that Wasn’t
So, why was HD DVD v. Blu-ray the “format war that wasn’t”? Consumer electronics manufacturers may not have learned from the past, but their customers had: the most common response to “HD DVD or Blu-ray?” was “I’ll wait and see.” I said it, and you might have, too. No one, with the exception of a few early adopters, was willing to risk spending hundreds of dollars on a player and then again on media that might soon become obsolete. And so they didn’t; 11.5 million players is statistically insignificant compared to DVD’s installed base of players numbering in the hundreds of millions (several times that if you include desktop and notebook DVD players.)
Also, for many people, the outstanding picture and sound quality delivered by DVD was simply good enough, especially in view of the low cost, wide availability, and absence of compatibility uncertainties. Moreover, unless you have an HD-capable TV, the greatly-improved picture quality (up to 1080p) of Hi-Def DVD is pointless anyway.
Lesson Learned?
History has shown us that winners and losers remember things very differently; reality varies greatly depending on what side you happened  to be on. It’s easy for the victor to claim being “right”, otherwise they obviously wouldn’t have won. This makes avoiding the sins of the past particularly difficult. Surely though, as technology advances ever-forward (toward Ultra HD and beyond), manufacturers will have learned what NOT to do when trying to produce new standards. Surely.
The End… ?
Sources: 1, 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_definition_optical_disc_format_war |
