It's a Wonderful Blu World

~ Thursday February 21 2008 15:00
Last week was actually pretty cool. Last tuesday January 19 2008, Toshiba officially capitulated in the well known format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. This means that HD-DVD will no longer be produced so it’s over. So if you waited for a winner, wait no longer. Blu-Ray has won and I kinda saw that one coming.

A couple of hours after the announcement, it was Universal Pictures turn to switch camps. That was also huge news, because Universal was in the HD-DVD camp from the start. So who knows, maybe we will someday enjoy Fighting Fish in High Definition.

And today Paramount and Dreamworks also returned. Hooray, a Blue Shrek the Third and a blue Transformers. And with that, all major studio’s are now officially Blu-Ray supporters.

So why did I saw this one coming? Years age, when there were no DVD + or - writers, I went to our local computer store to ask which one of the two DVD writable formats sold best. And the salesman answered that I shouldn’t wait for both, but wait for Blu-Ray. This wasn’t the first time that I heard about Blu-Ray, because Philips and Sony were developing this for some time now, and yeah well I love technology so I like to be informed about these kind of things. But this was the first time I heard this in a store, and this was in 2002 I believe.

It wasn’t until 2005 that HD-DVD got any attention . At that moment, almost anyone in the industry had their eyes in the direction of Blu-Ray. HD-DVD was in my opinion nothing more than a diversion. See if they could use the good name of DVD. But the only success they had was that they had their launch date first. But I’m sorry, the red case and brand just looks aggressive tome. Blue looks cooler from a color standpoint. And these kind of feelings about the brand are very important to the user-experience.

There are a couple of preconceptions about Blu-Ray as a strategy from HD-DVD. Some are accurate, some are nonsense. There was a coating on the discs that gave problems, but that has already been fixed. Also the licenses for producing the discs would be really expensive, but that was only if you produced them at a Sony plant and that’s ancient history now. No porn on Blu, also only at the Sony plant. No the only thing we can argue about is profile 2.0, in other words BD-Live. They really need to release that soon. And I’m not just saying that as a user, but also as a developer.

Good Week :)

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