Prompt's TechBlog

Which was the first major Format War to impact your life? For most thirty-somethings out there it was probably the VHS / Betamax video battle, but depending on whether you are more or less youthful than myself, you may have been forced to choose sides in the reel-to-reel versus compact cassette skirmish, the Nintendo v Sega console cataclysm or most recently the Blu-Ray/DVD fiasco.

I say fiasco because the two sides of the conflict seem to be have radically different plans of attack, with on one hand DVD continuing world domination with countless billions of media and hardware sales penetrating every corner of civilisation and on the other Blu-Ray bungling any chance it ever had to win hearts or minds with a stumbling marketing offensive of pitiable proportions.

The reason I mention any of this at all is because of this story on the BBC technology site today that got me shouting at my screen like the geeky curmudgeon I have become. Essentially it revealed that many of the few players the Blu-ray camp has managed to get out into the market, primarily as multi-compatible loss-leading products, have already been exposed as impossible to upgrade to future iterations of the tardy Blu-ray standard. Early adopters had expected some firmware or software upgrades somewhere along the line, but surely none expected their machines to be obsolete before they were in anyway practical alternatives to DVD in the first place.

You can investigate the problematic 'profile' rollout problems further for yourself by reading the BBC story or hitting Blu-ray forums, but as Frank Simonis of Philips (and the European chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association) insightfully told the BBC, this division of Blu-ray players into potentially three camps is "not an ideal situation".

Personally I just think Blu-ray device manufacturers got plain greedy. The existing home video disc market looked verdant, the land grab opportunity arose and they all rushed to build on unstable territory as quickly as possible rather than taking the time to establish decent foundations in fertile regions while encouraging co-operative communities.

"We needed to create momentum and get the players on the market," admits Simonis. "If we had postponed launch to add in the hardware for the latest features, we would not be in the situation we have today." Yup, that's about the size of it, they didn't call him Frank for nothing, did they?

So, do you have a Blu-ray player? Did you buy it primarily because of the Blu-ray 'functionality' or was it just a happy side-effect of selecting a really nice DVD player? Do you feel cheated? Or will it all turn out nice in the end? Please let us know.

*And finally, if the weak pop culture reference in the headline made any sense to you at all, you might want to check out this little nugget of video nostalgia in a spare moment. Not a patch on Favourite Shirts mind...

Labels: blu-ray, dvd, format wars