Sep

26

Format war to continue for quite a while

Posted by Todd

September 26, 2007 |

If you have been following this blog you will notice that I have blogged a couple articles about the format war. More specifically, I blogged about a new format HD-VMD and the fact that Warner has shelved its Total HD format. It seems like these moves, along with HD-DVD stealing Paramount away, have all but assured that a clear winner can’t emerge. Not for a while at least.I have been noticing a couple articles popping up this week talking about the format war continuing for at least another 18 months, and I think this is fair. It isn’t as though we are going to see one format win over another overnight. BluRay definitely has the technology advantage. From what I have seen at work there is just more you can do with it. The problem is, it can’t seem to compete on the price front. With consumers this is all that really matters anyway. The cool aspect of BluRay isn’t really enough to justify a higher price tag. At the end of the day the video quality is very close with both formats.

Toshiba released some data from a customer survey dealing with what type of next gen format they are going to purchase. 51% are undecided. It just proves that the early adopters are a very small subset of the population. I would just say that the larger percentage of consumers are just smart. It makes little to no sense to jump into anything at this time. This is the exact reason that it took DVD almost 10 years to knock VHS from it’s throne. Believe me, DVD was a much greater advance over VHS than what we are dealing with today. DVD isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Forrester Research has been heavily behind BluRay from the start. But even they concede that HD-DVD isn’t making it easy on them. The key they say, is to make sure that BluRay can hold onto the rest of studios. They don’t have a choice. If they lose another studio is will put the industry on it’s ear so to speak. Consumers pick up on this and will start to move toward the cheaper format. That’s how a format war ends. It just wouldn’t make any sense for BluRay to continue.

I know for a face that it’s going to be hard for the price to come down. It’s expensive to compress the video. It’s expensive to program all of these neat features. If nobody is buying the discs, which they aren’t, you can’t afford to lower the prices too much. Unless you can be sure that it will be enough to push consumers into adopting. Who knows? It’s a gamble.

What does this go back to? It’s simple. All along I have been preaching that optical media will fold to digital distribution. With VHS/DVD there wasn’t really anything that revolutionary in the pipe to sneak in and take over. Today there is. DVD was able to hang around for 5-10 years to take over. BluRay/HD-DVD simply doesn’t have that kind of time. They are on borrowed time.

Source


Comments

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

<< Post Navigation >>

« « New high definition releases for September 25th 2007 | Qflix hopes to bring download to own to the masses » »



-->