With more and more companies backing the Blu-ray format, including MGM and Warner who both recently started backing Blu-ray for movies, it looks like it has enough support and momentum at this point to ensure Hollywood chooses it as its preferred standard for high definition content. Sony even reckons that the battle has ended and that was before MGM announced its support. On the other hand, HD DVD is not likely going to disappear either, since even if it fails to do well in the standalone device market, it is expected to have enough support to keep it going well enough in the PC market.
Although Microsoft is backing HD DVD and will offer native support for this format in its upcoming operating system, the entertainment industry is likely to have the most impact on which side succeeds in become the successor. For example, as Sony's upcoming PlayStation 3 will incorporate Blu-ray support as well as the playback of Blu-ray movies, the success of Sony's PlayStation 1 & 2 series may be enough to push sufficient PlayStation 3's on the market to ensure Blu-ray succeeds, since anyone with a PS3 will in turn effectively have a standalone player to play Blu-ray movies.
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"For all the talk of a unified digital home, deep divisions still remain," notes David Mercer, Principal Analyst at Strategy Analytics. "Billions of dollars of revenue are at stake as PC companies battle with the consumer electronics industry for control of the digital home media server. DVD's replacement will play a critical role in determining the success or failure of each group." |
Up until recently, I was strongly interested in seeing Blu-ray succeed for both the PC and entertainment markets, however all these recent anti-piracy measures to give as much control of the players to the content providers as possible is making me think twice of the format. It seems as if the Blu-ray backers are taking advantage of customers interests in seeing it succeed that they can quickly add extra security features at this point that would have initially put consumers off.
When it comes to the PC market, the most likely one to succeed in my opinion will be which ever format offers the best price per GB. For example, if Blu-ray's 25GB media costs over double that of HD DVD's 15GB media, chances that consumers would sooner go for the HD DVD format instead of saving physical storage space with the Blu-ray format. We can already see how poorly Double Layer DVD+R media is doing, not to mention Dual Layer DVD-R media. While both DL formats offer quite poor compatibility with standalone DVD players, the main reason for their poor sales is due to their high pricing. For example, if one wants to back up 50GB of data, chances they would sooner save on the price by buying DVD±R media than to cut half their storage space for the discs by forking more out on DVD±R DL media.
Source: Business Wire
