Digital Home Thoughts: Is Blue-Ray Destined to Follow in UMD's Footsteps?

"It’s been known for some time now, the next generation of optical disks is rolling out this summer and this fall. HD-DVD players are already on the market but their main competitor, Sony, has plans to release their answer to HD content with the launch of the PS3. Many may be sceptic knowing that Sony is the main backer of this technology considering the fallout of their recent UMD. UMD is the custom media storage that came with Sony’s PSP gaming console. Their PlayStation Portable got a fair success but Sony had in mind that the UMD (Universal Media Disk) would be massively used to bring movies to the portable era. However, the last few months have proven that the UMD is not very popular amongst users and movie studios. With the upcoming PS3 someone may wonder if Sony will fail again, or loose the war like with their old Betamax. In short I think the answer is no, they have everything on their side to make Blu-ray a major success."



I'd disagree with the article in that I think Blue-Ray will fail just like UMD (although I am not willing to put my money where my mouth is and upgrade yet). However, the reasons Blue-Ray will fail are completely different from the reasons UMD failed. There are some big differences between the two. There was only one piece of hardware made to play UMD and that was the PSP. There will be multiple Blue-Ray products and they will support watching movies in the most popular format, television, while UMD was only usable on the PSP and its smaller (albeit beautiful) screen. UMD was not really competing against another format (yet it still failed) while Blue-Ray has a competitor (and would probably otherwise succeed if there was no competition).