Blu-Ray Vs HD DVD Over?

17 Feb, 2008 Rant or Raves, Tech

In the mid to late 1970’s there was a format war between Sony and JVC.

Sony had come out with the Betamax format and JVC introduced the VHS format a year later. Obviously VHS was the winner since not too many people even know what betamax is. There was also another little known battle for the CD format that Sony lost out on. Now for the last year or two we have been in the middle of another format war, Blu-Ray vs HD DVD. Sony, probably still bitter from losing the last battle, made a hard push to not repeat the losing effort. So what better way than to pair the Blu-ray up with a proven winner like their very successfully Playstation system. The Playstation 3 was introduced with a built in Blu-ray player as the disc drive. The Playstation 3 was comparatively more expensive than say the Xbox 360 or the Nintendo WII but it was also the cheapest Blu-ray you could buy until recently. The Xbox 360 had chosen the HD DVD side but it did not come built in, you had to buy the HD DVD separately so it didn’t give HD DVD as much exposure. In the end many people may say that this format war may have well been won and lost by video game systems.

All the different major motion picture companies had been split on the formats in the beginning. Recently announcements have been made by some that they are dropping their support of HD DVD and moving to Blu-Ray, as retailers are doing the same. Now as the tide definitely seems to be turning in favor of Sony Blu-ray there have been reports that Toshiba may be thinking about conceding to the Blu-Ray format. Has Sony finally won a format war?

What does this mean for us? Well you no longer have to be on the fence or hope that you pick the right side and invest in one format only to see it disappear. Sorry to those who bought HD DVD, it will be a collectors item.