Alright that’s it. For once, I’m with Sony on this one.
Indoctrinated on the Sony brand very early on, Dad’s purchase of that first silver, push-button 19″ Trinitron (circa 1980) was for years the driving force behind every home electronics purchasing decision I made. I still remember being the only one in my family who cared enough about those 200,000 little red, blue and green dots on my Trinitron to tell everyone in my extended family how much more special the “Sony picture” was than anything else ont the market.
By the time mom hooked me up in middle-school with my first gold Walkman, it was over. I was Sony Fo Life. Yup… me and Grandmaster Flash sold a lot of Sony for Sony that summer..
looked so much more special than — My last year and a half of school was spent using a knack for hashing program code to pay tuition and eventually a degree and a real job. Working my way through it all, I looked back and began to see a pattern: From Betamax to Looking back though
For one thing, tech blog dbtechno.com reports that
PS3 Owners are due to get bigger doses of porn on Blu-Ray in 2008 than their HD-DVD owning bretheren. And since we all know — regardless of whatever bells, whistles, features, add-ons and accessories that nice kid at BestBuy is so apt to sell us on — in the end, when it’s time to bust out the American Express and head to the checkout counter — all it’s really gonna boil down to , is how much booty will end up being available on our format of choice.
Come on, don’t fight it. While it might just be a once in a while thing, with over $20B in annual sales in the U.S. you are FAR not alone in your love-hate relationship with porn, so don’t even stress it. Besides, take heart: The Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD conflict is over and, like so many other product wars that dragged on, wasting untold billions for businesses and consumers, you can go ahead and thank the hot, steamy world of Adult Video for putting the nail in an another dead-end technology coffin.
First it killed the Adult Film… then those creepy theaters. Then Adult content kept e-commerce from dying an untimely death in the early 2000’s by giving us something else to invest in after the tech bubble burst.
Screw the sales numbers. Forget the studio titles and ignore the ever-shifting list of consumer electronics and movie studios, media and entertainment brands jockeying for position in both camps: The format war is over. Blu-Ray has the Porn and that’s all there is to it.
It’s been my contention from the start that Blu-Ray had the cooler name to begin with and that ultimately, husbands and dads the world over would just feel sexier saying “I just bought Scarface on Blu-Ray” than they would if they had to choke on HD DVD while munching on pretzels and beer.
From the start, Sony hitched their wagon to the “blue laser” and, regardless of whether consumers understand the broad home theatre implications of the 400-nanometer wavelength or not, Blu-Ray just sounds… better.
Anyway, I definitely digress.
crazy. i know it always LOOKS like Sony is up to it’s old tricks (betamax. memorystick, etc.) with the whole “proprietary” thing, but in this case,
the way the story goes, the HD DVD basically got caught sleeping. HD DVD is brought to you by the same techology board that has governed the current DVD format since the early 1980’s.
It’s a pretty interesting tale in risk/reward actually…
In the 90’s, broadcast HD was taking off and you could clearly see the need to put HD on a disc — an impossible task for standard DVD given HD’s huge data requirements (4x the 1s and 0’s). The whole “HD on a disc” thing thing is made possible by one of two methods: (1) adding a second physical layer to the existing (same physical format as DVD) , “red” laser format (twice the capacity) — OR (2) using a 2nd generation, high(er) freqency, “blue” laser that is much more expensive to manufacture.
Sony’s ALWAYS looking to get into new shit anyway, so when somebody finally found a way to make a reliable “blue” laser, Sony saw a chance to do an end around the entire industry and lock up the potential billions that would come from licensing the new techology for discs, players, logos, etc. (currently nobody pays royalties to Philips for the “dvd” format they practically developed on their own 25-years ago).
So Sony
hooks up with the inventor of the “blue” laser,
forms their own industry group and then spends the next few years trying to prove it can work. Meanwhile, the old DVD establishment (chaired by Toshiba) took the cheap way out by going the “dual-layer” route. They pioloted it with the same “red” laser technology as before, but beefed it up with an improved, higher capacity substrate (where the data goes)
and a second one right underneath it (dual layer) .
Naturally, the studios preferred the this method. It meant they could play it safe with the “existing” DVD establisment, avoid dumping hundreds of millions into new disc manuacturing equipment — and — most importantly — allow them to market new technology to consumers (and charge us for it) without discs only to double back, rename themselves and go with the blue (higher wavelength = more data throughput). Somewhere in the middle of development (2003-5), Toshiba scraps “dual layer”, doubles back and starts over with “blue” laser technology (after Sony had already proven/perfected it). The dual-layer “advance” was going to end up meaning the same thing for Studios and consumers (new hardware) and so, much to the Establishment’s “embarassment”, they went “blue”.
This was basically when Sony won. The main part of the argument (how to read the discs) was already settled; now all they had to do to capitalize was get the players out there.
So on one side, you have Sony (the main actor in a cast that includes Apple, Dell, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, LG, Sharp and Sun, and others known as the “Blue Ray Disc Association” et. al) taking on all the risk (initially, before they started winning) of a new technology bet vs. Toshiba (whose seat on the long established DVD Forum included basically everyone else like Hitachi, Mitsubshi
But they brought in Microsoft and Intel to throw their weight behind their effort.
The Justice Department even tried averting the format-war, but by the time HP came in threatening to join forces with the HDDVD people
~ by kbenobi on February 19, 2008.
[...] dvdbiblog wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAlright that’s it. For once, I’m with Sony on this one. Indoctrinated on the Sony brand very early on, Dad’s purchase of that first silver, push-button 19″ Trinitron (circa 1980) was for years the driving force behind every home electronics purchasing decision I made. I still remember being the only one in my family who cared enough about those 200,000 little red, blue and green dots on my Trinitron to tell everyone in my extended family how much more special the “Sony picture” was than anything else ont the market. By the time mom hooked me up in middle-school with my first gold Walkman, it was over. I was Sony Fo Life. Yup… me and Grandmaster Flash sold a lot of Sony for Sony that summer.. looked so much more special than — My last year and a half of school was spent using a knack for hashing program code to […] [...]
Picking a Side in the High-Def Format War said this on June 6, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Very funy idieas. Thabk you!