HD is dead, long live Blu-ray

It’s been a long two years, but the HD DVD v Blu-ray war has finally screeched to a halt.

At a press conference earlier this week, Toshiba officially announced that it would no longer develop, manufacture and market high-definition DVD players and recorders. Shipments of HD products will be reduced and then finally ceased by the end of March, including HD DVD disk drives for both PCs and videogame consoles.

Although Panasonic are lax to openly admit defeat, there’s little doubt that HD has now joined the Betamax tape and the VHS in the great warehouse in the sky.

As is often the way with this sort of move, the reasons behind it (or at least the ones being made public) are vague at best.

“We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. Which in English means sales were falling quicker than the US Dollar.

The irony is that despite lacking the support of three of the six main studios, most major reviews favoured HD DVD from the get-go. Cheaper, not hampered by region coding and with picture and sound quality to rival the local multiplex, Toshiba initially wiped the floor with Sony’s laughably poor Blu Ray technology. I remember with sunshine clarity a friend of mine purchasing an early Blu-ray copy of The Fifth Element. You’d think that film couldn’t get any worse, wouldn’t you? But oh, no. Whole scenes were plagued by random white specks, with the rest of the film looking flat, colourless and completely lacking in depth. Laugh? I was almost institutionalized.

But by last summer, the joke was beginning to turn on me. Blu-ray began to overtake HD in terms of quality and sales, a turnaround helped in no small part by Sony’s Playstation3. The corporation had learned from its mistakes, fast.

For the hand that hammered that final nail into the HD coffin, we need look only to Warner Bros., the undisputed big daddy of the high-definition realm, who paused only long
enough to deal Sony a resounding two-finger salute before defecting to Blu-ray over the New Year.

Now the disc is in the other drive. I’m slowly being hounded out of town by gales of derisive laughter and the clickety-clack of my friend’s keyboard. Because for those of us who own HD DVD players or discs, life is about to get frustrating. And expensive, since thus far, the studios have yet to announce any kind of ‘format swapping’ program (transferring HD into Blu-ray, for instance), leaving us with only one option – to buy the whole damn lot again on Blu-ray. And with these films costing anything between 20 and 30 quid a pop, the stage is set for an uproar of epic proportions.

Still, if only one good thing can be gleaned from this battle, it’s that the quality of home entertainment hasn’t so much risen as pierced the stratosphere these last two years. The bar has been raised incredibly high and with Sony now facing competition from iLounge, Apple’s high def film rental service, it looks like 2008 could be a revolutionary year for the entertainment industry.

JOE MARTIN