Format War Ends: Blu-Ray Victorious

Early this morning, February 19th, 2007, Toshiba announced that it would discontinue making and marketing HD-DVD technology, thus officially ending what may be the last media format war in history. Church bells around the country ring out to celebrate the international digital media peace pact, but in the trenches and battlefields of the consumer market, many customers are left crippled or dying. For some, the news comes as a joy just to see the hostilities desist, regardless of the winner. For still others, the armistice has little meaning, signaling the end of a war almost as remote and vaguely-understood to the average person as the Persian Gulf Wars (there was more than one?).

Should you care? No. Well, yes… maybe a little. While the smoke clears and the corporate soldiers collect their spoils, I’d like to share some ruminations and remembrances.

The High-Definition Format War (HDFW) was notable less for its physical carnage, high body count and strategic maneuvering than for its devastating psychological effects on the hearts and minds of our nation. Die-hard enthusiasts led somewhat feeble armies against each other, emerging as heroes or martyrs in their own minds, but generally serving only to drive the civilian populace into the suburban hills, where they held out until the fighting had ceased. Most could hardly distinguish the red-coats from the blu-coats and didn’t care to get involved.

Blu-Ray was marginally technologically and tactically superior. HD-DVD had safer supply lines and more industrial backing, but suffered due to a recruitment and ally shortage. Blu-Ray had higher capacity per layer and faster bitrates for data transferring, but the cost per disc was slightly higher (on the order of about 10 cents) and the cost for switching over the manufacturing plants and menu/feature programmers added more. HD-DVD was smart enough to go region-free and was cheaper, but had no technological advantage.

It is thus somewhat surprising, though hardly sad, that Blu-Ray won out. Cheaper usually makes all the difference to the largely uncaring public. This is why there is a McDonald’s on every corner, but your Uncle’s burger joint went out of business. It’s why we were stuck squinting at Gameboys when the Lynx had backlighting, power-save, more colors and support for left-handed players (I’m still not over that one). Perhaps more relevantly, it’s why all we now have VHS’s gathering dust in our closet shelves when we could be having Betamaxes gathering moon-dust on our private space-yachts (OK, OK, it didn’t really set us back that much). The best news, though, is that Blu-Ray’s one major disadvantage is fleeting. The higher cost is largely transitional, and the second wave is expected to drop in price. (If we continue to get gouged it’s because Sony hates us, not because it is actually costing them a fortune.)

Every war does have its victims, but at least this time it wasn’t the children. Toshiba, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and countless consensual consumers can be counted amongst the causalities. Yet in the economic arena, war is often quite lucrative. Movie industry companies along the volatile HDFW border, like Netflix, Blockbuster and the studios HAD to choose sides (or at least bite the bullet and support both), but the civilian population was never drafted. For once the cowardly and the shell-shocked behaved exactly like the savvy and simply laid low. Meanwhile the arms race led to better arms, and we got all sorts of ancillary perks we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Forced to compete in a macabre fight to the death, technology continued to improve, new coatings increased durability and hardware costs dove. You just didn’t see that back in VHSnam where technological turnaround wasn’t fast or practical.

So if there is reason to care, I’d say there’s reason to celebrate. Proudly wave a flag, any flag, and don’t mind if a couple of jaded vets are still licking their wounds. Still… I’m guessing that the victory will be short-lived, that the fireworks will soon fizzle and that, a decade from now, the survivors will not bother to bore their grandchildren with war stories. The reason? Formats are becoming as irrelevant as swordsmen in a battle between satellites exchanging missiles.

Digital storage just means a pile of 1s and 0s. You can put those just about anywhere and exchange them rather quickly. They can skip just about every step that used to involve factories, warehouses, stores and computer drives. I suspect that before another format war can ravage the land, downloadable content will have pacified the proletariat and sent the warlords packing. Thumb-drives are already making HDFW capacity propaganda seem as silly as VD prevention videos in WWII. Sony should shower in gemstones why they can, because the decline of the format empire is just around the corner.