DVD was released a very long time ago now but people are still pretty happy with the quality of the content. There have been two significant physical formats released since but neither HD-DVD or Bluray have really helped people to take the plunge forward into high definition formats. And to be honest, this failure of good quality digital content is quite annoying.
HD-DVD was looking pretty promising until Sony got the format killed by paying off the hardware manufacturers and studios to not produce content or players. And the winner is... um? Bluray?
The largest deployment of Bluray players is the Sony PS3. In other words most people aren't buying Bluray players. Joe average really couldn't care what Sony is telling him he needs, Joe likes his games and doesn't want to pay twice the price for a movie digitized in slightly higher quality. Bluray is a failure. Sony failed again with another higher quality proprietary format. You'd think that after 25 years that the pattern would be obvious. If it's too expensive and too difficult to work with then people won't be interested.
HD-DVD was looking like a great storage format, cheap, standard and a significant improvement over previous formats. Bluray looked like a mess. Encrypted, expensive, complicated, encumbered and proprietary. But here we are! Still using dual layer DVD's on our computers and watching SD DVD's on our television sets. A technology company has willfully monopolized a market to replace a good product with ... nothing.
What's come to replace our widespread use of portable write-once DVD's? Portable re-writable memory keys. Yes that's right, Sony can not only not sell us Bluray players, disks and burners but pretty soon nobody will be buying Sony blank DVD's anymore.
And what's the value of a HDMI port going to be when few people have any HDMI content to run through it? When a new content delivery mechanism (like on-demand digital downloads, IP-TV subscriptions, SOC delivered movies) shows up and people start using it, what television manufacturer is going to pay Sony for the 'right' to attach a useless port and expensive encryption to their cut-price widescreen LCD TV?
It sickens me to read about Bluray winning the high definition format war when the truth is that Sony is holding back technology by trying to stifle standardization and competition. But thankfully free market economics wins out. Somewhere behind a desk in Japan is a very shamed executive still adamantly demanding that the free market bend to their will.
Perhaps corporations should be democratic? Remember, even society used to be feudal.
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