A casualty of the DVD wars has written up his experience for Slate.
While I freely admit my moronitude, I still believe the HD-DVD owner is an unfairly maligned creature. It wasn't dumb to jump on the HD-DVD bandwagon: Toshiba's technology was cheaper and more consumer-friendly than Sony's. It was dumb, though, to assume that the forces of good would triumph. In the end, the fight between Sony and Toshiba played out like some kind of bizarro sports movie: The bad guy won at the end by clocking the lovable underdog in the crotch with a baseball bat.
. . .
On the eve of January's Consumer Electronics Show, Warner Bros., which has the largest library of any home-video retailer, signed an exclusive pact with Blu-ray. With disc sales declining, Warner's president said, the company needed to "erase consumer and retailer confusion over dueling DVD formats." Warner's defection put five of the seven major Hollywood studios on Team Blu-ray. Just like that, nobody seemed to care that HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies looked and sounded pretty much the same or that Toshiba's players were way cheaper than their Sony counterparts. No, this war ended in the most annoying way possible—with a bunch of mega-corporations telling gadget buyers they didn't care which format was better. They just wanted it to be over.
At this point, Toshiba turned to a strategy that industry experts call "denial." After admitting he was "disappointed" with the Warner Bros. announcement, a Toshiba exec added, "Sales of HD-DVD were very good last year." This was a bit like the scene in The Naked Gun where Lt. Frank Drebin stands before an exploding fireworks factory and shouts, "Nothing to see here!" In the succeeding weeks, every entity that's capable of writing up a press release—Netflix, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, the nomadic tribesmen of Outer Mongolia—announced it was going Blu.
As these HD-DVD disavowals hit the Web, I got sad ("This blows"), then mad. ("This blows!") All of these companies had been too lily-livered to pick between HD-DVD and Blu-ray when it could've made a difference; instead of having the guts to make up their own minds, they let Warner Bros. tell them what to do. Even worse, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and BusinessWeek reported that Sony, perhaps having learned its lesson from the Betamax debacle, paid Warner Bros. between $400 million and $500 million to go with Blu-ray. Sony hadn't won because it offered the HD-buying public any other tangible advantage. It took down Toshiba because it knew whom to pay off.
Every time there's a format war, the losers complain that the inferior product won through nefarious methods. During the Microsoft antitrust wars, Apple and Netscape dutifully trotted out the Betamax VCR and the QWERTY keyboard as examples of the way that network effects and switching costs could lock in an inferior format. This was always mostly myth, particularly in the case of Sony's Betamax format, which came out well before the VHS format that ultimately won. As with Microsoft, while Betamax may have pleased technophiles, for ordinary users it had serious drawbacks.
In the case of Blu-Ray, the "Sony paid off Warner!" story may have a pleasingly nefarious ring, but that's not quite the whole story. HD-DVD was already losing the format wars, as the author himself admits:
After three minutes of research on Engadget and Gizmodo, I decided this was clearly going to be a war of attrition. While Sony had the lead in disc sales, Paramount and DreamWorks had both announced they would release titles only on HD-DVD. Since a) neither side looked ready to budge, and b) I have no impulse control, it was time to make a decision. Blu-ray discs can hold more data than HD-DVDs, and more studios were behind Sony's format. [Emphasis mine] Still, Sony never had a chance to get my business. Wasn't it my duty as a shopper to back the cheapest option? For the $377 that Circuit City was charging for a Blu-ray machine, I could've bought two of Toshiba's players (14 free discs!) and had enough money left over to buy a Walkman and a rotary phone. I was casting my lot with HD-DVD. What could possibly go wrong?
Even before Warner made its announcement, Blu-Ray was already outselling HD-DVD. Warner may have delivered the killing blow, but it's very likely that all it did was alter the timing, not the final outcome. One could argue that it was a mercy killing, preventing more people from investing in a dead-end format.
What this really, shows, I think, is that storage is king. VHS beat Betamax, not because it made some shady deals, but because its discs could hold more. Blu-Ray players may be more expensive now, but when you're committing to a format for your movie library, you need to think long term. And if history is any guide, what we'll most care about in the future is more space.
Update Tom Lee respectfully disagrees:Megan's right that I and a lot of my fellow nerds aren't very happy about this outcome, but she's wrong to say that "[e]very time there's a format war, the losers complain that the inferior product won through nefarious methods." I'm not sure that's a fair characterization. In this case I can admit that Blu-Ray is the technically superior standard. Many technologists didn't like it because it seemed a bit more DRM-laden, because it didn't seem worth the price premium, and because Sony has behaved very badly with respect to proprietary media formats in the past (Redbook/CD excepted, but of course that was a joint venture with Philips). I should say that I don't really have a dog in this fight — I don't own a drive from either camp, and tend to think that we'll only get halfway through this generation of tech before network delivery of video consigns Blu-Ray to a CD-like role (except less useful due to the aforementinoed DRM). But that doesn't mean I'm happy with the way things turned out for HD-DVD. It's not so much that I think there were dirty tricks involved (although there may have been). It's just that it's frustratingly obvious that the factors determining a technology's success frequently have little to do with its capabilities, price, performance or other innate attributes. Rather, they're the result of quirks of the business environment into which the technology is born.Further update Ryan Avent weighs in:
I understand what Tom’s saying, but I think he’s missing some key points. He wants to judge a technology in a “pure” world, outside the presence of the market conditions in which it will be sold and used, but you can’t do that. The utility of a technology is inextricably connected to the market conditions in which it will be sold and used. A Beta videotape might clearly be superior on most quality variables, but if a VHS tape is long enough to hold a full-length movie and Beta isn’t, well that’s important. Saying that length shouldn’t be as important as other variables is pointless; the market didn’t just want “Quality,” it wanted a certain quality.
I own both HD DVD and Blu-ray. HD DVD was clearly the superior format that provided exclusive superior menu's, combo discs, functionality, interactivity, extra content and web enabled features not to be had on Blu-ray. All this and HD DVD players were only $100 compared to $500 - $2,000 for BR players that dont meet there final specs yet.
As to storage, Blu-ray has claimed greater capacity with 50g discs for the last year but what isnt published that much is the fact that most releases on Blu-ray are actually on 25g discs. Additionally HD DVD had just approved 51g discs which gives HD DVD the superior storage capacity.
Blu-ray won, because the studios accepted bribes, nothing more.
This does not show that storage is king. Content is king.
If storage was king, then all Blu-ray movies would have included video games and soundtracks and tons more bonus features to fill up 50GB or even more of disc space.
Content is king. Once Warner shifted to a single format, that meant that the majority of movies were now going to be on Blu-ray. If that's where all the movies are, then the customers will have to follow.
"HD DVD was clearly the superior format that provided exclusive superior menu's, combo discs, functionality, interactivity, extra content and web enabled features not to be had on Blu-ray."
I'm willing to bet that the far majority of movie watchers never use any of these items. Most only care about the movie on the disc and I don't think you can make a strong argument either way about which one is better.
I think the nail in the coffin happened this January when Blu-ray players started to be handed out for free (or near free) with select HDTVs. Also having the PS3 be such a high quality player Blu-ray player put them in a lot of homes as well. If the Xbox360 came standard with a HD-DVD player it may have lasted as a format much longer.
"VHS beat Betamax, not because it made some shady deals, but because its discs could hold more."
Um... discs? Wow, the VCR really must be dead if we can't remember what its storage format even was anymore... TAPES! It was TAPES!
The problem with format wars is that they force you to think that because one lost, the other won-- that is, that the battle between HDVD and Blu-Ray was a two entity, zero-sum game. However, sales for Blu-Ray are still tiny. I'm not convinced that Blu-Ray is going to take off, not with the ever-increasing capabilities of on-demand and streaming content. If I was to bet, I'd say that the future probably isn't a different kind of disc, but no disc at all. And many people with HD TVs seem happy to purchase up-converting standard DVD players, which, while not Blu-Ray quality, do deliver high enough quality. Remember, Laser Disc didn't have a similar-quality competitor; but it failed all the same.
From the article you linked on QWERTY:
The QWERTY keyboard cannot be said to constitute evidence of any systematic tendency for markets to err. Very simply, no competing keyboard has offered enough advantage to warrant a change.
The question is of course what constitutes "enough" advantage. Could a new keyboard with 5% added efficiency break through today? I seriously doubt it. But if it couldn't, we are giving up the chance of being 5% more productive. This is not necessarily a market failure, but it's exactly what the issue is with network goods.
I agree that the quality of the technology is a relevant factor in winning format wars, but it would be stupid to deny the other factors, such as marketing, first mover advantage, and bribes.
@jordanT -
yeah, but the xbox360's media focus on downloadable content. although msft backed hd-dvd, they didn't really have a big dog in the fight. i suspect microsoft backed hd-dvd just did it to make sony's commitment to physical media as painful as possible.
Additionally HD DVD had just approved 51g discs which gives HD DVD the superior storage capacity.
...and then from Wikipedia:
"In January 2007, Hitachi showcased a 100 GB Blu-ray Disc, which consists of four layers containing 25 GB each. Unlike TDK and Panasonic's 100 GB discs, they claim this disc is readable on standard Blu-ray Disc drives that are currently in circulation"
The whining about pay-offs is just sour grapes from the losing vendors and the early-adopting consumers. There were deals of this type going around in the HD-DVD camp as well, not to mention all of the subsidized hardware prices to try and convince consumers to early adopt one over the other; but nobody pays attention to them for the same reason that nobody cares about unfair labor policies at Burger King: It's easier to shoot at the winner.
The peripheral content argument is also a loser, since there's nothing that prevents the same from being done with Blu-Ray, and in any case, most people buy a movie to watch a movie, not to play a glorified version of Tic-Tac-Toe with one of the minor characters. Regardless, this affects remarkably few people now, since HD is still an emerging market. Meanwhile the HD-DVD hardware and discs are not going to self-destruct, and an HD-DVD player continues to be a functional DVD player.
Granted, it is a pity that HD-DVD lost, since the HD-DVD vendors were making a far more dilligent effort to consolidate the standard and be backwards compatible amongst the hardware generations, while the Blu-Ray standard seems a bit disorganized. However, with Blu-Ray now the clear winner, I expect the content and polish will come as quickly as it did with DVD.
Yes, I think studio support and marketing, and perhaps the influence of the PS3, were the key factors in Blu-Ray's victory. I doubt that the higher storage capacity of Blu-Ray had any significant effect. In fact, early Blu-Ray releases were generally considered inferior to HD-DVD ones. Blu-Ray eventually caught up, but in terms of audio and video performance there's now essentially no difference between the two formats.
@will
My cable company is going to need to get a lot better at delivering content before this can happen. We've been talking about a move from physical media for a long time, but it still offers a lot of advantages over downloadable content, such as consistency and reliability. Not to mention the PQ is currently better. I was using Xbox360 not as much as telling Microsoft what they should do, but to illustrate one of the big advantages Blu-ray had over HD-DVD.
I think once Blu-ray players drop to be competitive in price with DVD players most people will start buying them. The DVD - Blu-ray switch over is a lot less painless than the VHS-DVD because all the old media still works.
A couple of thoughts:
1. The author is trying to spin a populist argument, that consumers (and I guess Warner) had the obligation to choose the cheapest format (actually, if you read between the lines, he really is saying that they had an obligation to choose the format HE chose). I don't really like such a utilitarian approach, but one could just as easily make a populist argument that Warner had the obligation to choose the format with the largest installed base, to hurt the fewest people.
2. I liked HD-DVD better too. So What? HD-DVD was dead almost from the beginning. Before the first adult bought a high-def DVD player, hundreds of thousands of teenagers already had a Blu-ray player built into their gaming consoles. It was a smart move by Sony
Freddie wrote: I'm not convinced that Blu-Ray is going to take off, not with the ever-increasing capabilities of on-demand and streaming content. If I was to bet, I'd say that the future probably isn't a different kind of disc, but no disc at all.
I would say that's a long ways into the future. Ever try downloading even 5GB of content in a reasonable time frame? Most US consumer broadband architecture isn't up for the task, or else comes with pricetags that would send the average broadband user fleeing for the nearest set-top HD player.
Downloadable content will get here eventually, but IMO at least one and possibly two more physical media standards will pass through the marketplace before downloadable content becomes a dominant standard, and physical media will have a long legacy life due to the last-mile problem that plagues large swaths of the suburban and rural US.
Remember, Laser Disc didn't have a similar-quality competitor; but it failed all the same.
Yeah, but did you ever see a LaserDisc? It was too much ahead of the technology, and consequently the media format was impractically large and hypersensitive to scratching. Contrawise DVD hardware started out in the same exotic price territory, but quickly became mainstream and has now all but obsoleted VHS.
Sorry for the threadjack, but the post mentioned Netscape v MS and I've been wondering about this for some time: What exactly was the point of the Browser Wars? What was the value to either party in having such a large market share? They both gave the software away, so profit doesn't seem to be a motive (to first order, at least).
You're probably right about downloadable content, at least for the near future. I guess I'm skeptical that people will migrate away from regular DVDs very quickly; to me it's analogous to the fact that the Playstation II has remained the top or near-top selling video game console, despite the introduction of new technology. But who knows? I'm not much of a predictor for most anything.
You're probably right about downloadable content, at least for the near future. I guess I'm skeptical that people will migrate away from regular DVDs very quickly
It's hard to predict these things. But as the price of Blu-ray players and movies approaches that of DVDs I expect there will be significant uptake. HD material really does look substantially better on those big-screen flat-panel HD displays that are rapidly becoming the standard in American living rooms. As a mass-market phenomenon, I think HD downloads are still a ways off, due to the bandwidth and infrastructure problems others have noted. But Blu-ray probably will be the last major packaged media format.
What exactly was the point of the Browser Wars?
The power to earn money in the emerging online market, and the power to dictate standards for online content.
Netscape, in the early days, was a primary mover and shaker in content standards, sold its product to commercial users at a profit, and made additional money from ad revenue and services offered via its portal site.
Free browsers were an early byproduct of the browser wars, the difference being that Microsoft was making dumptrucks full of money from its other operations and was able to play cat to Netscape's mouse. Netscape Corporation tried to reorganize around its web portal operations, but was eventually absorbed by AOL and the code base went open-source as the Mozilla project. The Mozilla code base presently lives at the heart of the FireFox browser, which has manage to keep pace against Internet Explorer primarily through open-source development and Linux compatibility.
Thanks, a-m.
What's interesting is, the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war ended in the opposite way that format wars usually end.
Often, the technically "superior" format loses, because it's more expensive and/or less consumer-friendly than the alternative. This is what happened with Betamax. VHS was simply the more consumer-friendly of the two, and could get more mass-market appeal.
With Blu-Ray, we have the opposite effect. Blu-Ray discs have greater storage, and the discs and hardware are far more expensive. From a technology standpoint, it's superior.
However, the HD-DVD format is much more consumer friendly. It's cheaper. It doesn't have annoying things like region-encoding. The HD-DVD standard has more features than Blu-Ray, and the feature set is more complete (whereas Blu-ray is still a work-in-progress, with new versions and new features being released that people with 1st-generation Blu-Ray players won't be able to access, and that HD-DVD had from the get-go).
So what happened? I don't agree that it's about storage space. Hardly anybody is using HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs for storage yet, because writable discs and burners for those formats are still quite expensive, and both disc types are plenty big enough to hold high-definition movies, so that's not an issue.
If you want to know how Blu-Ray got the edge, here's the simple answer: The Playstation 3. The PS3 is also a Blu-Ray player. It's true that the PS3 isn't selling very well for a game console. However, for an HD player it's selling quite well. Keep in mind, HD players are still a very small niche market, so even a poorly-selling game console with a Blu-Ray player in it can make a huge difference in that market.
What should Toshiba have done differently? I think they should've done what Sony did. Sony basically took a loss on the Blu-Ray player in the PS3, in order to get more Blu-Ray players into homes. What if Toshiba had taken the same strategy with the XBox 360? They should have approached Microsoft with an offer to subsidize HD-DVD players in the XBox 360, so that Microsoft could include it at no, or very little, additional cost to themselves.
If they had done that, all the movie studios would've jumped to HD-DVD long ago, and Blu-Ray would've been dead by the time the PS3 arrived. There are way more XBox 360s in homes than there are standalone HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players. Especially when you consider that they knew the PS3 was coming and would have a Blu-Ray drive, it seems like a major oversight that Toshiba didn't do everything they could to make it painless and free for Microsoft to put an HD-DVD drive in the 360.
I think The Deuce's comment hit the nail on the head.
Deuce,
I agree with your comments and conclusion, but had one small nit:
It's true that the PS3 isn't selling very well for a game console.
Looking at the chart options available at:
http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php
...it appears that the accumulation of PS3 sales is comparable to or exceeds that of Xbox 360 from a launch vs time perspective.
There is one amusing anecdote.
On a touch-tone phone, the digit 1 is in the upper left corner. On a desk calculator [and on the number pad of a personal computer] the digit 7 is there instead.
"Why did the phone company deliberately violate the standard when they introduced touch-tone"? you ask...
My father was an early adopter of touch-tone. He often got misdials because he touched too fast, and the phone company couldn't handle it. He complained and the phone company's customer service rep said that fast typists often jammed the system. They had to make the touch-pads different from calculators so there wouldn't be hundreds of thousands of people so well practiced at typing numerals fast that they would often get misdials. The phone company almost certainly chose that layout with that in mind.
My cell phone [a Treo] has a physical key pad that follows phone conventions and enters digits into the Palm OS. I've downloaded a calculator app and I feed it digits using this key pad. sigh. Fortunately I'm not practiced enough on a calculator that I'm losing speed by following the touch-tone conventions, and in fact I don't actually own any desktop calculators, or even any pocket calculators since I have the cell phone.
-dk
This is why I'm not an early adopter.
"it appears that the accumulation of PS3 sales is comparable to or exceeds that of Xbox 360 from a launch vs time perspective."
By the numbers there have been about 10million PS3 sold, while 12 million Xbox360 were sold since the release of the PS3. Xbox360 also started with a 5 million advantage, for a total of 17 million sold.
Compare this to around 1 million total HD-DVD players sold and it's no wonder that Blu-ray got the backing of the industry. There are 10 million Blu-ray players out there due to the PS3, plus the standalones. Every Xbox360 with a HD-DVD player would have changed the outcome significantly.
Blu-Ray won due to the success of nefarious plots perpetrated by Intrade bettors who didn't want their pay-off left to chance.
Jordan T,
But it's not as simple as that. We can assume that standalone players are bought for movie-watching, but how many PS3s were bought primarily (or exclusively) for gaming rather than watching movies? And how many Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on drives were sold? Evaluating the impact of the PS3 on the outcome of the format battle is a lot more complicated than just looking at the number of units sold.
But it's not as simple as that. We can assume that standalone players are bought for movie-watching, but how many PS3s were bought primarily (or exclusively) for gaming rather than watching movies? And how many Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on drives were sold?
I think that looks past the point. It's not that the unit was bought for that functionality, since it often wasn't. It's the fact that when the PS3 owner is faced with the prospect of purchasing HD content, s/he doesn't have to deliberate between purchasing another very expensive set-top box, or doing without. Blu-Ray wins by default.
Similarly, I know of many first-gen XBox consoles that were purchased exclusively with gaming intentions, but invariably got used as DVD players, since this was back before set-top DVD players could be had at Wal-Mart for $35.
anony,
It's not that the unit was bought for that functionality, since it often wasn't. It's the fact that when the PS3 owner is faced with the prospect of purchasing HD content, s/he doesn't have to deliberate between purchasing another very expensive set-top box, or doing without. Blu-Ray wins by default.
But the effect of a PS3 sale on the success of the Blu-ray format depends on how many Blu-ray disc sales or rentals it stimulates. On average, a PS3 is probably going to stimulate fewer disc sales than a standalone player of either format, or a HD-DVD add-on drive for a Xbox 360, because many PS3s will have been bought mainly or exclusively for gaming rather than watching movies.
Just as an indicator of how effective Sony's PS3 strategy was, and just how much of an oversight it was for Toshiba not to subsidize an HD-DVD player in the Xbox 360, consider myself:
If the XBox 360 had an HD-DVD player in it, I would own a few HD-DVD movies. That's because I own an XBox 360, and if it had the ability, I would've taken advantage of it. However, I don't own any HD-DVDs, because I don't own an HD-DVD player, and that's because I didn't yet consider it to be worth it to buy a standalone HD-DVD player for the purpose.
On the other hand, I wasn't planning to ever buy a PS3. As a game console, I considered it too expensive to be worth it, because there aren't many games on it that I'm much interested in, and because I was already satisfied with my XBox 360 in the high-def gaming department. However, now that Blu-Ray is the hands-down winner, I plan to buy a PS3 in the next year or so. Why? Because I figure I'll want to go high-def eventually, and now high-def means Blu-Ray. I'd put it off longer, but the fact that the PS3 is a decent-quality Blu-Ray player, which is cheaper than most Blu-Ray players and happens to play games, cumulatively makes it attractive to me.
So there you have it. Sony's market strategy of subsidizing Blu-Ray players in the PS3 has worked on me, and I wasn't even predisposed towards buying a PS3 or a Blu-Ray player to start with. I can only speak for myself, but I think I'm representative of a fairly substantial number of consumers here. Just imagine if Toshiba had done the same thing first with the 360, with a year's head-start and no competition. They would've gotten all the same benefits, and they would've prevented Sony's strategy from ever working on guys like me (since the tipping point for me was that 1) Blu-Ray won, and 2) I don't already have an HD player).
Mixner wrote: But the effect of a PS3 sale on the success of the Blu-ray format depends on how many Blu-ray disc sales or rentals it stimulates. On average, a PS3 is probably going to stimulate fewer disc sales than a standalone player of either format, or a HD-DVD add-on drive for a Xbox 360, because many PS3s will have been bought mainly or exclusively for gaming rather than watching movies.
What you're asking for is a crystal ball that explains exactly how fast HD content would catch on in the market place, and which standard would succeed. But these were unknown entities when Toshiba and Sony began plying their wares.
The fact that most PS3 owners bought the console primarily for gaming is exactly the point here. When you buy a set-top media player, you are buying a device of comparatively limited function. It has to justify itself to you on its own merits, and if there are two competing standards, you have to further gamble on which standard will succeed. PS3 owners either wanted a game console and weren't trying to justify a Blu-Ray purchase at all, or were using it as additional justification for spending that much money on a game console. Either way, when they can encounter HD movie content later on, Blu-Ray wins by default on the impulse purchase because they are already in possesion of a Blu-Ray player.
I'm baffled that you think this to be some sort of novel idea. Sony Pictures has supported Blu-Ray from the beninning, and Sony Computer Entertainment sold the PS3 in traditional console fashion: take a loss on the hardware, make up for it in content sales. The inclusion of the Blu-Ray player added a large number to Sony's loss figures on the initial PS3 hardware sales, and further caused shipment delays, both of which could have been mitigated by using a conventional DVD player. Sony Corporate would have gone to all that trouble unless they expected these two aspects of their business to symbiont each other.
And they appear to have gambled successfully.
I remember the epic battle between the Glorbags and Flurgogs. The Flurgogs had developed the painting and drawing of animal figures and people having sex using human blood. The Glorbags found a way to do it with animal blood. The battle rages for months and months with bribes being paid with mammoth skins and ivory arrowheads.
The Glorbag format won in the end when all the Flurgogs died of anemia.
anony,
What you're asking for is a crystal ball that explains exactly how fast HD content would catch on in the market place, and which standard would succeed.
I'm not asking for anything. I'm pointing out that PS3 console sales figures weren't a particularly useful indicator of the likely success of the Blu-ray format, because what really matters is disc sales, and many PS3s were bought mainly or exclusively for gaming, not movie-watching. This is not a controversial point. Industry analysts understood that the sale of a standalone Blu-ray or HD-DVD player was a more reliable indicator of consumer interest in each format than the sale of a PS3.
Mixner, of course purchase of a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player was a sign of interest in the format. It is unlikely people were purchasing either primarily as a DVD player, since both were extremely expensive compared to Door #3: a DVD player. Any bright fifth-grader could have told me that.
How does this address the main points, i.e., (1) there was a format war in progress and (2) Sony had a 10M-unit advantage of installed technology among a demographic with a demonstrated commitment to spend a lot of time and money on audio-visual entertainment?
anony,
How does this address the main points, i.e., (1) there was a format war in progress
I'm not sure why you think I was addressing or needed to address that point. Were you under the impression that I think there wasn't a format war in progress?
and (2) Sony had a 10M-unit advantage of installed technology among a demographic with a demonstrated commitment to spend a lot of time and money on audio-visual entertainment?
I addressed that observation in the way I just said. Here it is again: "PS3 console sales figures weren't a particularly useful indicator of the likely success of the Blu-ray format, because what really matters is disc sales, and many PS3s were bought mainly or exclusively for gaming, not movie-watching." If you dispute this, explain why you dispute it and we'll go from there.
"And how many Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on drives were sold?"
The 1 million number included all HD-DVD players, including the Xbox360 add-on drives (about 300,000 if you were wondering). I think you underestimate the impact of just owning the equipment has on a consumer. You go to Blockbuster or Netflix to rent a movie and you're demanding Blu-ray. Why? Because you have the player and want to see how it looks. You head to the store to purchase Spiderman 3, maybe you pick up the Blu-ray version instead of standard DVD because you own one.
Anecdotally, I got a Blu-ray player free with my TV last month and would not own one otherwise. Of course, now that I have one I purchase and rent Blu-ray movies sometimes instead of DVDs. To act like owning a Blu-ray player has no impact on the spending habits of a person is wrong.
I'll disagree, Mix. Suppose someone buys a PS3 with no idea a format war is underway. A year later, he sees "Knocked Up" and decides he MUST have Kathrine Heigl in HD. So he ambles down to Best Buy and starts looking at HD players. A helpful salesman asks: "Gee, do you have a PS3? It has a Blu-Ray player built right in!" Presto, format choice made for that disc, and, because buying one Blu-Ray will tend to lock him in for all future movies, for many to come.
You don't have to want the Blu-Ray player, you just need to let its existence influence some future purchasing decision.
Rob Lyman,
You can't answer the question with a made-up anecdote. If, on average, a buyer of a standalone HD-DVD player buys 10 HD-DVD discs for every 1 Blu-ray disc a buyer of a PS3 buys, then 10 million PS3 sales would contribute as much to Blu-ray disc sales as 1 million HD-DVD player sales would to HD-DVD disc sales. I'm not saying these numbers are correct, I'm just illustrating the point that the ratio of sales of PS3s to standalone players wasn't a meaningful indicator of the relative level of consumer interest in each format. You have to discount the PS3 sales figures by some amount to compensate for the fact that each one is likely to generate fewer disc sales than a standalone player, because many PS3s will have been purchased for gaming rather than movie-watching. I don't think this is a difficult point to understand.
Mixner, I have no disagreement with your latest post.
But before, you didn't say "consumer interest." You said "likely success." That's a very different animal. "Consumer interest" in a format is not a question that anyone cares about. For my part, I have no interest whatsoever in format questions of any kind (Mac/PC, MP3/Itunes, Ford/Chevy, whatever, I don't give a crap), and I suspect most consumers feel the same way. I, and the average movie watcher, just want to do what is easy and cheap for me.
The question for studios concerned about "likely sucess" is: "Which format will most appeal to consumers who don't give a crap about technical details or fancy interactivity, but are looking for easy and cheap ways to see half-dressed starlets reading inane dialog?"
The answer is: the format which has made millions of players available at zero marginal cost to consumers. If I want to watch HD-DVD, I need to go buy a player. Even if they're only $100, that's $100 more than what a PS3 owner needs to pay to watch Blu-Ray. The issue isn't "interest" in the format (whatever that means), it's what people are going to do when the walk into Wal-Mart to make an impulse buy. Some will buy a player, but millions more won't need to. Regardless of "consumer interest," the format with more players in American homes faster is the better bet for "likely success," all other things being equal.
But before, you didn't say "consumer interest." You said "likely success."
Well, I meant the two phrases to mean basically the same thing. The more consumers are interested in a product, the more likely it is to be a success.
The question for studios concerned about "likely sucess" is: "Which format will most appeal to consumers who don't give a crap about technical details or fancy interactivity, but are looking for easy and cheap ways to see half-dressed starlets reading inane dialog?" The answer is: the format which has made millions of players available at zero marginal cost to consumers.
Your question above is silly. If the consumers who bought PS3s have little interest in either HD disc format, because most of them bought the machine mainly for a different purpose (gaming), PS3 sales figures are not a good indicator of likely success of the Blu-ray format. It all depends on the correlation between the sale of PS3s and the sale of discs. Just because someone owns a PS3 that is capable of playing Blu-ray discs doesn't mean they have much interest in doing so. As I said above, I think studio support and marketing were probably the major factors for the success of Blu-ray, such as it is.
If the consumers who bought PS3s have little interest in either HD disc format,
Speaking of silly, what are the odds that neither consumers who use the PS3 nor some other member of their household will never, ever, become interested in buying or renting an HD disc? Maybe in some alternate universe, but not in the real world. I don't even own a TV at the moment, but I wouldn't bet on never doing so. My point is that you need not care about the Blu-ray capacity of the PS3 when you buy it for it to be a significant marketing tool for the formap later on.
I think studio support and marketing were probably the major factors
I'm not going to disagree with this as written. But surely part of the pitch to the studios was: "We already have 12 million players in homes!" or some such. And surely that fact meant something to the studios, just as "your teenaged son owns a Blu-ray player already" means something to Mom when she's shopping for HD discs.
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/456
The proof is in the recent sales results. HD-DVD has historically beaten out Blu-ray in sales, but the gap has recently been closing due to a heavy favoring of Blu-ray recently. For some reason despite HD-DVD showing "the most consumer interest" their sales were down compared to Blu-ray in January. There is a cause for a shift in the historical trend, and the big thing is that PS3 players have been put into a lot of homes in the last few months. What is the explanation for the shift, except over 10 million Blu-ray players being put into homes over the lsat few months.
Toshiba HD-DVD lost mainly because their army was too small, and their main ally Microsoft was disinterested. I think the major problem Sony now has is getting ordinary people to understand what Blu-Ray is. I did a poll at work and everyone said HD-DVD was a better type of DVD, so they sort of got it, but only 1 in 10 people knew what Blu-Ray was. DVD is good enough for most people and (unless there are drastic price cuts) by the time Blu-Ray has enough players in homes something else will come along, most probably downloads.
I'm sorry but why equate these formats to somehow one side being good and one side evil. Both did tactics to try to get exclusivity form the studios. These are just two competing companies that both want the same thing, your money. Blu ray is going to come down in price just like DVD did(in fact faster. Just get over it one fotmat one over the other, it happens. I think they would of both ended up having the same capabilities and pricing, but blu ray has more potential headroom in space for the future.
I don't own either sort of drive, but I think the victory by Blu-Ray is a bummer anyway. HD DVD players were getting cheap enough that I probably would have picked one up fairly soon -- not so Blu-Ray players. Also, AFAIK, the HD DVD protection had been cracked but not so Blu-Ray. I rip and convert my DVDs for playing on my personal media player -- I'm not going to buy a format where I can't do that.
So screw it, I'll stick with DVD and wait.
Seems ignorant to spend 400-2000 on a player alone. The best blu ray player currently on the market is the Playstation. A blu-ray player with gig's of built in hard drive space, Wifi Card, 4 digital camera/media card slots and USB's galore. This was simply a maneuver to prove ultimate in compatibility. Just buy a PS3. It can even charge/load up your MP3 players without installing anything. Things work out well if your willing to give it a shot. I find it interesting that most people complaining haven't even tried a blu-ray. I have both, and thankfully, blu ray won. The discs are almost unscratchable as well.