Hasta la Vista, HD-DVD...

[Dave B]

Sony has won a format war! At last .
How many have they lost?

I suppose technically Minidisc won out over Philips' DCC, but it was rather a phyrric victory

[Daniel]

It's 100% official now
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/s...51&newsLang=en

DonJippo. You can still buy the 360 and get a Bluray add-on in future I'm sure

http://www.dailytech.com/Microsoft+C...ticle10749.htm

[veeten]

the rats are deserting the ship... :

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-987...?tag=nefd.lede

[Mark]

I suppose technically Minidisc won out over Philips' DCC, but it was rather a phyrric victory

Yes I was just thinking about that one.
They lost Sony Betamax vs JVC VHS, I think that one was mostly because JVC was first to market and was cheaper, in a time when TV's sucked so quality issues weren't noticeable.

Sony MiniDisc did beat Philips DCC, but much like recent world events they won the war but sqandered the peace! Mini Disc recorders were far too expensive (£200+ which is a lot even now), compared to the casette tapes they replaced, and the same as casettes you could only record to them in real time. If they had their brains in gear they would have brought out a version you could connect to a PC from the start, but by the time they did Apple had already released the iPod: game over.

The HD-DVD vs Blueray battle is kind of the reverse of VHS vs Betamax, once again Sony came out with the slightly better but more expsensive model, and again were second in the marketplace, but this time managed to pull off a victory. Perhaps it was the extra storage space on Blueray discs, or just that Blueray sounds much more interesting than HD-DVD

[Dave B]

I think this time round Sony's major coup was fitting Bluray in the PS3 and thereby putting HiDef DVD in a million teenage bedrooms. Purists and geeks may care about the technical nuances of Bluray vs HD-DVD, but most consumers won't be able to tell the difference - or care. Many of them will have bought a £40 upscaling player from the supermarket, and still believe they've got HD!

Whether it ultimately goes on to be as successful as VHS or DVD as a mass storage medium depends a lot on whether film distribution emulates music by shifting almost entirely online.

Obviously a movie or even a TV programmes makes for a far bigger file than an MP3, but as internet access gets faster and storage gets cheaper we may well see the demise of all physical formats within a decade or so.

[Mark]

Totally, I believe this is the final format war, as content will be delievered online. But for now I believe blue-ray has got a good 10 years of life ahead of it as HD content delivery platforms just aren't up to the job right now.

You've got plenty of on-demand services of SD content such as Sky BoxOfficer and Virgin Movies on Demand but DVD sales are still going strong, so it's got a long way to go. Plus the fact that there isn't currently the model for keeping a downloaded film (not legally anyway) and the ones you can download are way move expensive than DVD rental.

Every time I've thought to myself "I would quite like to see that film" and looked for it on 'OnDemand' it hasn't been there

[janneppi]

You need a pretty fast network connection for it to be commercially viable way to trasfer movies
Let's say someone has a 100Mb/s connection to a DC hub type thingy, a trasfer of a 700Mb Linux distro would take less than a minute, that would make trasfer times of larger files such as HD movies acceptable.

On the other hand that same person might only have a 2Mb line and transfers the same Linux distro which would take well over two hours, that would be unacceptable for that hypothetical person.

If the transfer times are far greater than it takes to visit your local video rental, it doesn't interest the masses.

[Mark]

Well the technology is already in place in some areas, I'm on Virgin Cable and I can watch programmes and film in HD 'OnDemand' basically streamed live over the network, there is no dowload delay.

(At least I could if I had an HD TV!)

[ioan]

the winner, by popular demand, Blu-Ray.

Popular demand? You must be kidding!

[Daniel]

Well the technology is already in place in some areas, I'm on Virgin Cable and I can watch programmes and film in HD 'OnDemand' basically streamed live over the network, there is no dowload delay.

(At least I could if I had an HD TV!)

That's not "proper" HD though. It might be @ a 1080p resolution but it's compressed to about the size of a DVD. I guess for a lot of people for whom a Dave said an upscaler is as good as high def this will be just as good.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=959