Why there can be only one winner in the battle of Blu-ray

Great - just look at the title - we've already got a journalist making Blu-Ray synonymous with the next generation of high definition media despite Toshiba launching HD-DVD first. So much for impartiality.
 
Sony and Apple gambled for high stakes and lost - their strategies would have been very profitable if they had succeeded, but the factors that made these strategies potentially rewarding reduced their chances of success. Microsoft's expansive profits from MS-DOS and now Windows are derived from low royalties on large volumes.
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Likewise, Telkom is playing for high stakes by holding back affordable broadband access to the masses due to high costs, long delays and tardy fault repair efforts. Their strategy, although protected by their monopoly can no longer sustain itself in an environment that is changing with each month as new regulations are launched, competitors find ways to circumvent (some for now, more as the law allows) Telkom's restrictive hold on the telecoms industry, alternative and innovative ways to provide service to the consumer, and the EASSy project due to compete with the hostaged SAT3 international gateway. Bottomline, Telkom ran high profits while they could but lacked the foresight to look ahead and garner the support of loyal customers.

To bring positive change, government should unbundle the local loop, find a way to declare the SAT3 access an essential service (which would allow the EASSy access an open policy in SA when it arrives), and ICASA should enforce realistic cost-based pricing for the wholesale sector. These will result in massive price reductions as competition builds. The SNO would merely need to plan their strategy long-term and cater for lower prices but on a larger scale demand - affordability and reliability of service delivery will drive an ever increasing demand. I see no reason why cheap, fast, reliable ADSL cannot be the same catalyst for the SNO that MS-DOS/Windows was for Microsoft.

All it requires is vision and a resolve not to profiteer off a shoddy service implementation only the rich can truly afford.
 
great read, thanks rpm.

consumers don't check discs to make sure they are compatible with their players. i can only imagine how many people tried to play DVD's in their CD players...

i believe that the only true solution would be dual players/recorders. these should be available soon after both standards are formalised.

if i remember correctly, their was a similar issue with DVD drives (R+/R-). solution was to get dual drives.
 
"Why there can be only one winner in the battle of Blu-ray"

Uuuhhhm .... ok ....

Because one consortium is backing the blu-ray technology so i guess they win.

Perhaps if they said "next gen" then it would be a different story.
 
Great reading indeed. This is the world characterised by greed, where one winner takes it all. I would hate to see the battle go on for years, but the longer they take the longer I'm holding on to my DVD player. There's nothing wrong with it or it's resolution. Who cares about extra pixels? Let them fight...
 
I think whichever format the porn industry settles on will be the winner.
 
There's more to it than just viewing movies in HD. Remember some countries are lucky enough to have HD TV broadcasts so being able to record these signals in their original format is essential to many viewers.

Sadly SA is sooooo far behind the rest of the world when it comes to HD content that there is not much to get excited about at the moment. Just look how long it took for our video shops to stock the first DVDs. And also look how expensive the first players were.

I don't think people are going to rush out to "upgrade" to blue-ray / HD DVD as it's not as much of an leap as it was from VHS to DVD.
 
We should remember though that these disks will also be used to store data. Blu-ray with the highest capacity will probable win then. The library of congress uses blu-ray which should tell a lot. I on the other hand will probably wait till the price drops to about R1000 (again).
 
Prometheus said:
We should remember though that these disks will also be used to store data. Blu-ray with the highest capacity will probable win then. The library of congress uses blu-ray which should tell a lot. I on the other hand will probably wait till the price drops to about R1000 (again).
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I'm really interested in this bit - do you have any links regarding the LoC's decision to use Blu-ray?
 
The whole issue of standards wars in this case is not so serious as it was with say VHS vs. Betamax, primarily because the underlying hardware is the same, a 5 1/4 inch disc.

With VHS and Beta there were physical differences, you could not build one player that could accept both physical formats.

We will always see standard wars. As a matter of fact, the only 'standard' bit is that there are always two, or more, competing standards!

Today we have this with DVD's, you can either get your 5.1 surround sound in Dolby Digital or DTS. The video can be in NTSC or PAL. Do you care? Not really, you probably have a multi-format player and your amp can decode both sound formats.

There are two new (competing!) standards for high-definition audio on DVD capacity discs; DVD-Audio and SA-CD. Completely incompatible but offering multi-channel high resolution audio. And every music house only support one format, you can only get Queen on DVD-Audio and Pink Floyd on SA-CD.

Do you care?, nope, just buy a universal player.

It's unfortunate that this will always be the case but as long as we have free enterprise companies will fight for dominance.

In a year's time, you'll have a universal player with both a blue and red laser that can decode any format known to man.
 
i think HD DVD will win because consumers are going to recognise the DVD part of "HD DVD player" and they not gopoing to understand what Blu-ray is cuz well it just dosn't sound like anything they have heard before... Like if u go upto some standard user and ask them what HD DVD is they could make and educated guess but ask them what blu ray is i bet they just look at u funny.
can it be as simple as this... could be.
 
Probably will be determined by content availability, i.e. which publishers will support which format. But don't count on any specific winner for a while yet, thus universal players.
 
Universal players are the only way either format will survive.
 
bwana v.9 said:
I'm really interested in this bit - do you have any links regarding the LoC's decision to use Blu-ray?
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Can't find any links. Read it in a PCFormat once. Stated the number of disks they have.
 
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