Thread: Blu-ray wins DVD format war

interesting read....


Blu-ray wins DVD format war

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Peter Alford | February 18, 2008

THE next-generation DVD war is over and Blu-ray, the format overwhelmingly backed by Australian early adopters, has won.
Australian consumers had already voted overwhelmingly with their wallets for the Sony-led Blu-ray technology


Japanese electronics conglomerate Toshiba, the pioneer and leading manufacturer of HD-DVD players and recorders, is expected to announce its surrender later this week.

The final blow fell on Friday for Toshiba and its backers - Paramount Motion Pictures, a few other studios and Microsoft - when supermarket giant Wal-Mart, the biggest DVD outlet in the US, said it would no longer stock HD-DVD players and discs once stocks expired.

Toshiba officials were not available for comment yesterday but Reuters quoted an unnamed company source as saying: "We have entered the final stage of planning to make our exit from the next-generation DVD business."

The HD-DVD camp had been besieged by defections since the January decision by Warners Brothers, owner of one of the world's largest movie libraries, to no longer issue videos in HD-DVD format.

Blu-ray, developed by a Sony-led consortium, and HD-DVD are competing optical video disc formats, designed to supersede standard DVDs and especially to take advantage of movie-theatre-quality vision made possible by high-definition television.

Blu-ray has generally higher technical specifications and is more expensive - about $200 per comparable player has been the retail rule of thumb - and Blu-ray discs have about two-thirds greater data capacity than HD-DVD.

Although a few, expensive dual-capability players have been developed, Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs cannot be played on machines of the other format. Conventional DVDs will work in a Blu-ray unit.

Australian consumers had already voted overwhelmingly with their wallets for the Sony-led Blu-ray technology. According to market analyst GfK Marketing Services, Australians had by the end of October bought 97,788 Blu-ray players (including PlayStation 3 consoles that come Blu-ray-equipped), against 3820 HD-DVD players.

The critical question now for the winners, led by Sony, is whether the great bulk of the home movie market that stayed resolutely on the sidelines during the format war will now join the victory parade.

The rush of digital technology is unlikely to leave the field to Blu-ray for two decades, as happened from the late 1970s when VHS videotape defeated Sony's Betamax in the classic format war. High-speed digital download is already shaping as a new adversary.

However, the US experience with video-on-demand has so far been disappointing and growth is likely to be restricted by broadband capacity constraints.

For consumers, the high-definition DVD war was brief: the Toshiba players appeared in Japanese stores in March 2006 and were followed three months later by the first Blu-ray machines.

However, most home movie watchers refused to make a choice, preferring to stick with "old-fashioned" video discs and players at least until the format war was settled.

In a clear warning sign to the industry, DVD sales fell last year for the first year ever, by 3 per cent worldwide.





Blu-ray wins DVD format war | Australian IT

Originally Posted by Reads90

Oh well another reason to buy a Playstation 3 then. As don't they have Blue ray

Indeed, i got one and it's bloody great! plus if you're into games then it's a bonus. From what i understand the PS3 has one of the best blue-ray readers out there ??? And compared to conventional blue-ray readers/players, it's well priced