During a long career as a television and technology executive, Mitch Berman has tried to sell several different iterations of TV, often in their formative stages. Now, Berman is onto the next new thing, delivering TV through the Internet.
The NPD Group released a report today showing that post-holiday sales of Blu-ray didn’t exactly skyrocket after Toshiba folded the HD DVD tent in February. After dropping 40% from January to February, sales of set-top Blu-ray players (i.e., those not built into a PlayStation 3) crept up 2% in March, NPD said. HD DVD sales, meanwhile, fell off a cliff that month.
Even if you don’t care one bit–and this probably describes the vast majority of Americans–you have probably heard by now that a Great Format War has been fought, and apparently won. The HD-DVD format for DVDs, backed by Toshiba, has lost out to Sony’s Blu-ray format. To be sure, there are some caveats. Computerworld’s Lucas Mearian writes that Blu-ray’s victory may not be remotely as meaningful as it seems. Having recently spent a cold, rainy, but thrilling afternoon walking the Freedom Trail in Boston, I would put it this way: The Blu-ray victory may end up being as expensive, and as predictive of ultimate victory, as was the British victory of Bunker Hill. So what are we to make of this format skirmish? We gathered up a group of smart people who think about such things and asked them the following: Is the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray really over? What can we learn from it?
Forget about customer satisfaction or superiority of image quality. The real issue in the war between Blu-ray and HD DVD was about royalties.
With the competition gone, the Blu-ray consortium now has the opportunity to persuade PC makers and consumer-electronics makers to adopt Blu-ray drives as their optical drives of choice. It will also get studios and disc makers to deliver Blu-ray discs to consumers. And every time one of those drives or discs leaves a factory, the Blu-ray Disc Association will get a royalty.
You can get away with a three-letter initialism as a product name, but if you try to stretch it to five, you’re sunk. HD DVD? It never really had a chance, particularly when it was up against a snappy futuristic-sounding name like Blu-ray. If the Jetsons had decided to get a second dog to keep Astro company, they would have named it Blu-ray.
Can’t you picture Elroy throwing the happy pup some kind of electronic chew-toy gizmo?
Fetch, Blu-ray!
A few weeks ago, when we noted that it really looked like HD DVD might finally be done for, we were surprised to see the number of folks in the comments insisting that we were crazy, and HD DVD had a long future ahead of it. Well, it appears that future has been cut short. In the past week, Netflix, Best Buy and Wal-Mart all said they would sell exclusively Blu-ray players and discs going forward, squeezing out whatever last minute hope there was of rescuing HD DVD. Now reports are finally coming out that Toshiba has come to terms with the inevitable and will officially kill off HD DVD in the next week or so. The thing is, this is really three years too late.
“What if nobody wins the high-definition DVD format wars?” the New York Times asks in a non-news summary of the battle between Sony and Toshiba over Blu-ray vs. HD DVD. But that’s the wrong question. The relevant one is “Who’s losing the format wars?” and the answer, still, is: Hollywood.
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