It didn’t take long after the end of the format war for online streaming to rapidly eat into the market that Blu-ray otherwise would have had to itself. While Blu-ray is the only current and possibly last physical optical media for HD content, it may have been a pyrrhic victory. Anyone stuck with an HD-DVD player was an unfortunate casualty of this short conflict. With Blu-ray the only format on offer, it became safe for consumers to invest in a player and discs. Universal Studios, an exclusive supporter of HD-DVD, announced on the very same day that their content would be coming to Blu-ray.Īll the supporting infrastructure and management structure for HD-DVD was soon dissolved and decommissioned. On February 19, 2008, Toshiba effectively threw in the towel when it announced that the development, manufacturing, and marketing of HD-DVD would stop. It’s conceivable that having that many HD-DVD drives in homes would have pushed HD-DVD purchases significantly. There’s no way to say how much of an impact this had on HD-DVD’s demise, but the Xbox 360 had a sizable head-start over the PS3, and Microsoft sold a huge number of them in the early stages of that console generation. This opt-in approach made it less likely that customers would go out of their way to buy an add-on drive, especially for a format in contention. In contrast, the Xbox 360 shipped with a DVD drive and offered an HD -DVD drive as an optional external add-on. Once the player hardware is nestled under TVs, it makes it much more likely that people will buy movies in your format. While this undoubtedly contributed to the substantial launch price of the PlayStation 3 (which was still sold at a loss even then), it also meant putting Blu-ray players in millions of homes. Just as with the PlayStation 2, which doubled as a DVD player, Sony included a built-in Blu-ray player with every PlayStation 3 sold. However, Sony’s Playstation division would allow it to perform a pincer attack from two different major entertainment markets. Sony knew that studios were concerned about piracy, and the additional focus on Blu-ray copy protection is likely why it received strong studio support. Some companies hedged their bets by supporting both formats. On the HD-DVD side were Universal Studios, Paramount, Warner, The Weinstein Company, Dreamworks, and New Line Cinema. This included Disney, Miramax, Touchstone, Warner, Paramount, and Lions Gate. Its position as a movie studio and general entertainment giant helped put the nail in the HD-DVD coffin much more effectively than any technical differences between the formats.Įarly in the format war, Sony convinced several studios to join its own studio division supporting Blu-ray. Sony was the major developer and proponent of Blu-ray. On the Blu-ray side, Sony was the main proponent, which would prove to be the major deciding factor regarding who would win. Toshiba was the main manufacturer putting its money on HD-DVD, though major optical disc players such as HP, NEC, Canon, and Ricoh also supported the technology. Blu-rays offered higher levels of durability but would be more expensive to make. On the other hand, HD-DVDs would have the same materials and level of scratch resistance as existing DVDs. This meant that relatively minor re-tooling would be needed to shift from DVD to HD-DVD production. HD-DVD was developed by the DVD Forum as a direct successor to DVDs, so it builds on the same technology. That’s a significant difference, and coupled with a notably lower data transfer rate for HD-DVDs, it meant that better-quality video and more additional content were possible on Blu-ray compared to HD-DVD. HD-DVDs can store 15GB of data, whereas Blu-ray discs can store 25GB of data. The biggest difference between HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs is the amount of data stored on each layer.
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