Confessions of a Serial Mapper

For those who do not already know, Blu-Ray and HD DVD are the next generation of movie formats, offering higher definition and greater sound quality supposedly. Now recently due to a series of rather unfortunate events, Blu-Ray is pretty much crossing the line victorious. The differences between the two are slight, Blu-Ray has slightly higher capacity, but is slightly more expensive.

But why did we as consumers need to live through this horror in the first place? Why couldn’t the companies agree on a single format to begin with? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier in the first place to just agree on a single format and pursue that one? By making two different formats, some companies will spend the money developing products for one format, only for that one to lose and have to develop for the other one, whilst others my develop technologies for both formats at the same time, usually at the result of high cost or poor quality. Surely companies will also lose out due to customers buying only one kind of format (rarely both) or staying out of the market completely, waiting for a conclusion to be reached.

For once, Sony was not on the losing side for a format war (see SACD, Minidisc, Betamax, ATRAC), then again, they have had some successes in the past before, so it shouldn’t really come as a surprise (3.5″ floppy disk, CD, memory stick). The victory of Blu-ray is also useful for the PS3, with it’s built-in Blu-Ray drive and the XBox 360 will soon enough have a Blu-ray external drive, like the HD DVD one it currently has (showing that Microsoft does have some level of intelligence somewhere in it’s organisation). I do want to congratulate Sony on having the balls to actually make the PS3 more expensive by putting the Blu-Ray drive into it, this move should pay off as now the PS3 sales should increase, along with it’s lowered price a few months back.

I still want to give an ultimatum to large technology companies and get them to stop all this useless bickering between them when it comes to a new digital format and simply settle on something in between what everyone wants. Yes this could be a challenge, seeing as each company has differing levels of research into different technologies, but the long term gains should outweigh this. Just think of the consumers next time and stop us from having to worry about which format to choose from.