High-def format war might not be won in living rooms
By Matt Burns 
posted Jun 6th 2006 11:13AM
posted Jun 6th 2006 11:13AM
This whole Blu-ray vs HD DVD thing is a topic that we here at HD Beat cover a lot. Truthfully, it is an important topic as many of you are anxious to buy ether HD DVD or Blu-ray but can't decide on a format. As much as we cover it here, and discuss it on our weekly podcast, the home entertainment market might not have a lot to do with who emerges as the winner. Studio support and interactive features will probably not have anything to do with who walks away from this thing but rather who is better supported on the computer side of it. Think of the sheer volume of computers that are sold. Whoever can get their recordable drives into a general market computer will...well...win. Toshiba once again has a huge head start as they already have put non-recordable drives in their own laptops. Oh, and you can buy one right now from a major electronic store. Acer is the next one to get into the HD DVD laptop game and has one on the way. A major manufacturer of both HD DVD and Blu-ray has indicated to Reuters that, yes, Sony is about six months behind Toshiba.
While Blu-ray has great studio support right now, that may change. The computer industry is dramatically bigger than the home entertainment industry and will have a bigger impact on the format war.
From the point competing formats were generally available to the consumer, how long did it take before VHS beat Betamax, DVD beat VHS, color TV beat b&w TV?
As a data backup peripheral, the relatively high costs of Blu-ray and HD-DVD seem to make those darn cheap $69 200-250GB drives a better bargain when one start RAIDing them. Even then, the serious data archiving will turn to tape for much, much more capacity.
And it is difficult to impossible to expect the livingroom economics to have any say when
Last I checked, 50>30. Seems more relevant for storage than movies, frankly.
I've been saying this all along. Why doesn't anyone listen to me?
The HD-DVD edge over Blu-Ray is not just PCs, but Microsoft. BR might have more capacity, but it is not being natively supported in Vista. Using a BR drive (already more expensive than an HD drive) will require licensing via a third-party software. This all adds up to a very pricey prospect for manufacturers, who have to be able to actual sell these computers to consumers. Volume sellers like Dell are going to offer the option that provides the most bang for the buck. For the foreseeable future, that will be HD-DVD. Manufacturers are certainly going to balk at putting $1000 drives into PCs in order to give an extra 20GB of optical space per disk. In the world of 750GB hard drives, 20GB is inconsequential, and using this metric, really, really expensive.
I don't see much point to HD-DVD/blu-ray burners until the media is less than $5 per blank disc.
DVD and CD-R burners are good enough for most consumers and cheap hard-drives make storage on external discs kind of pointless, and tape makes more sense for long term archival.
Right now the prospects of HD DVD or Blu-Ray as backup devices isn't quite a homerun. HDD have far outdone optical drives in price/per GB and performance. If consumer homes follow the SMB market they will begine to backup online and to HDD and then archive to a nice cheap solution like tape.
If and that's a big "if" BD-R media can come down to $10 for SL25GB and $15 for DL 50GB they have the opportunity to make some waves in some areas.
Neither drive is really all that fast.