Les Bonnes Choses

For a little while now, a battle has been brewing to decide the next generation of digital media (well, commercial video, mostly). The contestants in the battle were Sony's Blu-Ray -- support for which has been included in the Playstation 3 for awhile now -- and HD DVD, developed by the 10-member DVD forum. And while hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, I can honestly say that I thought that Blu-Ray was going to come out on top two christmases ago. The reason: clarity. Here's the logic: back during the beta/vhs wars, two very similar technologies came out that gave consumers the ability to do something they couldn't really do at all before: record and play video at home. If you want to know why VHS won out in the end (despite being an arguably inferior format), you'll have to research that yourself, but I think it came down to marketing. Next up came DVD (no competitors, because those 12" video disks never caught on at all). Relative to video tape, DVD had obviously superior resolution.

Here's where I think the clarity issue comes into play: At about the same time, people were converting in droves from their old 4:3 TVs to HD TVs and tuning into all these HD channels and seeing a huge difference - the same difference people saw when they first saw the improvement from VHS to DVD. In other words, perhaps in the consumer's minds, DVDs are already HD. From a marketing perspective then, the HD DVD brand has been diluted because it doesn't seem like a new product. Blu-ray on the other hand sounds like something completely different.

Also, Hitler apparently endorsed HD-DVD, which is never good marketing: