TechLahore

Lots of hot stuff based on Blu-ray technology, but will it ever be mainstream?

HD DVD, as well know, was Toshiba’s much-hyped successor to DVD technology. It was competing with the Sony Blu-ray technology, and while it provided slightly lower quality, it was cheaper and had the support of giants such as Microsoft. As a matter of fact, HD-DVD even made its way into the Xbox 360. None of this, of course, prevented the standard from dying a horrid death. Toshiba could not compete with the significant array of movie production companies Sony had lined up behind its standard… and if Toshiba had a distribution vehicle in the Xbox, Blu-ray had one in the Sony PS3. At the end of the day, Toshiba decided to call it quits and the industry was awash with articles reminding us of the Betamax/VHS wars.

So, if HD DVD lost, did Blu-ray win? Well, certainly in the short term. But to borrow a line of argument from former President Clinton, it depends on what the meaning of the word, “win” really is? It’s certainly not clear to me that Blu-ray will ever *really* be the “new DVD”. In fact, I think online distribution is fast making distribution by disc meaningless. The recession has curbed discretionary spending on new Blu-ray players, and even more importantly, on the really expensive, 1080p displays without which you will not be able to perceive the difference in quality between DVD and Blu-ray. And while all this is going slow, online videos and services are proliferating – because they’re everything Blu-ray is not; cheap, flexible, instantly available with a huge selection of new and old movies and compatible with existing PC hardware in every office and every home. In times of economic strife, cheap always wins… for exhibit A, just look at Netbook vs. Notebook sales figures. The economic conditions skew things in favour of cheap/free, lower-quality online video and the expense of amazing but expensive, Blu-ray.

By the time we do come out of the recession – which I’m hoping will be by Q2 of 2010 – Blu-ray will be so 2008. Will it be a technology that goes from hype to obsolescence without massive adoption in between? (with apologies to Oscar Wilde!) I certainly think so.

Gizmodo has more on this, including additional reasons why Blu-ray just ain’t meant to be.

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