Digital Home Thoughts: Cringely's Thoughts on Blu-ray

"There is growing sentiment in the industry that Blu-Ray, as it was originally intended, is a failure. How can that be? Wasn’t it just a year ago that Blu-Ray, with its greater data capacity, triumphed over the opposing HD-DVD standard? Well promises were made to achieve that victory and now it appears promises may have been broken. Understand that the success or failure of Blu-Ray has little to do with games and everything to do with movies. Two historical events informed the battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. First was the epic and costly 1980‘s competition between the BetaMax and VHS tape cassette standards. Second was the triumphant succession of DVD over VHS, when we all replaced our tape libraries with disks, gladly paying anew for what we already owned, buying every Hollywood exec a new Mercedes in the process."

Cringley argues that the reason Activision is putting pressure on Sony has more to do with a failure of Blu-ray than game sales. Although I was hoping HD-DVD would win, I think the perceived failure of Blu-ray is really a matter of falsely defining the definition of success. Expecting Blu-ray to replicate the success of DVD was not reasonable. Neither HD format offered the kind of upgrade that DVD offered over VHS. Plus, people have lots of DVD players, so unless they want to restrict their viewing to just one TV, they've got to replace all their players, which is not exactly cheap. One of the great features of HD-DVD was the combo disk, which eliminated this problem. Eventually, Blu-ray players will achieve penetration through a slow war of attrition as old DVD players get replace and Blu-ray players reach a price that DVD players will no longer be produced.