HD-DVD: “HD” stands for “Highly Dead”
by moose
So it seems that HD-DVD is going the way of the dinosaurs.
Let’s do a quick recap… A few years ago, there were two incompatible formats for HD discs: the Sony-backed Blu-ray Disc and the Toshiba/Microsoft-backed HD-DVD. Blu-ray had for it a larger maximum storage (up to 50GB) and a stronger anti-copy layer, but is expensive since it requires special blue laser diods. HD-DVD had for it that it was cheaper to manufacture (both media and drives) since it uses standard DVD-type laser, but can hold “only” 15GB per layer. Also, this was a battle of Sony vs Microsoft that came just at the time when the “next-gen” console war was brewing.
Sony decided to include a Blu-ray player to its PlayStation 3 console, officialy to allow games to use more storage, although it was widely admitted that it was a plot to bring Blu-ray movies into the living room. Microsoft chose to go the easy and quick way and shipped the XBOX 360 with a standard DVD-drive, adding later an add-on external HD-DVD drive for movies. Sony got a lot of flack for its Blu-ray decision with the PS3, especially since the launch was delayed by several month because of yield problems on blue laser diods, which allowed Microsoft to enjoy a one-year lead in the “next-gen” war.
But
things
happened…
The 360’s external HD-DVD never really caught on (external peripherals for a console?), while Sony still managed to ship several million PS3, and even if 360 were almost twice the number, the attach rate with HD-DVD add-ons was really low.
In November 2007, The HD DVD promotion group announced that 750,000 HD DVD players have been sold. The 750,000 number includes stand-alone players and the Xbox 360 add-on.
Meanwhile, for each PS3 sold, Sony sold a Blu-ray player, ensuring that they had AT least 10.49 million units ou there by January 1, 2008 (According to Sony).
Think about it: if you bought a PS3 for gaming, are you going to buy an HD-DVD player for watching HD movies? Nope, you’re going to just buy Blu-ray movies and pop them in your console. I know because that’s exactly what I did: bought the console for gaming, then started buying movies just because I had the player in there. So in the end, the much maligned Sony strategy worked (again… remember that people cried that Sony was crazy to include a DVD player in the PS2, how that made it expensive and customers wanted a cheap console for playing games? Well, the PS2 sold more than 102,000,000 million units -yeah, that’s millions). The balance started tilting slowly in favor of Blu-ray as movie studios one by one announced that they would drop HD-DVD in late 2007-early 2008. Now, it’s a full-on rush to the life boats.
So, now it seems that Sony’s decision was right, and that’s probably a sweet revenge over the Betamax/VHS format war. OK, like always it’s not necessarily the best technical solution that wins, but still it is a good thing to have a format war ending (I hated it when I read that great movie X would be released as an exclusive on HD format Y).
R.I.P. HD-DVD, we won’t miss you.
