Feb 19, 2008

Dead Disc

Finally, it seems the format wars are drawing to a close. With Toshiba throwing in towel in the form of a "Quick Decision", HD-DVD is out of reckoning. Ladies & gentlemen, the winner is Blu-Ray Disc. Sony, Phillips and Matsushita can now hog the entire HD industry. In my opinion, i would have liked to see HD-DVD as winner. Low production costs would have ensured HD-DVD capturing the market early. But I guess bigger consortium with bigger stake in the pie won it all.

I remember the original DVD introduction when drives and players started at exorbitant prices and then fell through the roof waiting for a better format with better cramming capability to appear. I guess we can see similar thing happening in case of Blu-Ray by end of this year. Mass production will send prices spiraling down by end of this year. Problem may still lie with studios though. Content will start appearing shortly but will push prices up initially. So we might have similar condition of cheaper players and costly media yet again. Solution? It lies with internet. Increasing bandwidth is going to make HD content easily available. So net result: Cheaper Blu Ray players and emergence of hd-content sharing P2P services is the next order of things.

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