Talks To Stop the Format War

It looks like the 2 camps just can't play nice. There had been talks between Blu-Ray advocates Sony & Matsushita and HD-DVD key player Toshiba to end the format war before it started - by introducing one standardized format for the next generation of optical discs.

Yeah, right...

Both Sides Take Up Arms

It was announced that the two seperate formats will blaze ahead, bringing yet another futile format war into existence. Consumers will either have to gamble that the format they choose will survive, or just wait until a format is declared the victor. I'm willing to bet that more people wait this time around, since everyone who owned a Beta payer remembers how awful it was to lose.

Sony might get lucky. Anyone who wants a Playstation 3 is going to have Blu-Ray capability, which means Blu-Ray will instantly have a leg up against HD-DVD. Too bad for Toshiba that neither Microsoft or Nintendo have opted to use HD-DVD in their upcoming video game consoles, XBOX 360 and Wii, which would have turned the tides on Sony... considering that the XBOX 360 is launching months ahead of Sony's PS3.

But, Sony could easily be wrong, too. Just because you have the ability to play a Blu-Ray movie in your PS3 doesn't mean everyone is going to go out and drop hard earned cash on movies that may not be playable on anything but a video game console.

The Losers

Obviously we, the consumers, will lose. But another loser in this game is the retailers, who have to carry multiple versions of the same product and suffer lost sales because nobody's buying. If a studio chooses, it could release the same movie to DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray, causing retailers to devote too much shelf space for a single product and wind up with millions of dollars in useless products in their hands when one of the formats keels.

Of course, lets not forget that redundant inventories means everything gets more expensive for retailers. I guess we'll all have to go back to paying 25 dollars (or more) per movie. Better yet, maybe they'll look back on LaserDisc's successful campaign and charge us all 70 dollars per disc... that'll work.

It may just be my opinion, but the manufacturers have all gone looney. The current DVD-Audio/SACD war may not have been detrimental to the market, since each format is a product that few are interested in (people want compressed music for iPods, not high-res music for stereos...unfortunately). However, everyone is salivating for movies in high-definition quality. All a format war will do is convince consumers like me to hold on to cash we're willing to spend, simply because we don't want buying a video player to be like placing a bet on the roulette wheel.

In fact, roulette really is the best example of the situation. The odds are that one of the proposed formats will win, and either HD-DVD(red) or Blu-Ray(black) will become the dominant format for the foreseeable future. But remember this manufacturers of the world, stepping on consumers to the point that they don't want to buy anything means the wheel stops on green, and both of you lose.

Place your bets...