Last week Warners announced that they will discontinue support of the HD DVD format, and this week Toshiba officially abandoned their HD disc format. Blu-Ray has won the High Definition format war.

It was much sooner than expected, with many analysts predicting the battle to last for many years, and dual format players to become common. I’m glad it wasn’t a long and painful death.

So why did Blu-Ray win? Both formats provided the same quality picture.

HD DVD players were cheaper. So that would suggest HD DVD should have had the advantage? Toshiba believed that they would sell more players because they were cheaper, and that by having more players in living rooms their format would win.


I think there were three key things that helped Blu-Ray win:

1) Content.
Blu-Ray started out with a good advantage by having more Hollywood studios on their format from the outset. This meant that they always had a potentially bigger library to release on their format.

2) Sony bundled the Blu-Ray drive into the Playstation 3.
This was probably a key move by Sony. With the PS3 these early adopters were getting a machine that played both HD games and HD movies. If Blu Ray lost the format war, the PS3 would still be useful for playing games. A standalone HD movie player had the potential to become useless if that format lost the war.

3) Marketing and Branding.

• 'Blu-Ray'- the name itself makes the consumer feel that it is a leap in technology.
• Blu-Ray has a logo. I'm not even sure if HD DVD has a logo.
• Blu-Ray is sold in blue coloured boxes.
• From my observations in Australia, and Asia, Blu-Ray discs were more available and presented better in stores. It was quite rare to see HD DVD players, and discs were always less in number when on display.

So the lesson for Toshiba is that it isn’t just a case of “build it and they will come”. You need to have a good marketing strategy for your product.

Now that the format war is over, some pundits are suggesting that Blu-Ray is still going to lose out to HD movie content online (streaming or download). However, I don' t think the technology to support this is really available in the medium term.

Matt Watson, Technical Director

Labels: Technology