On Sunday, the war between the new high-definition-disc formats officially began. Sure, HD DVD has been available since May, but as of June 25th, Samsung's BD-P1000 Blu-ray player is now available in stores for anyone who wants to buy it. With the opening battles of this format war now raging, we invite the generals behind the two factions to take a look back at previous conflicts before planning their next attacks.

While most of the people on the planet are familiar with the major types of media used throughout the world like CD, DVD, and even their predecessors, the audio cassette tape (formally called the Compact Cassette) and VHS, the route to a successful format is littered with the remains of long-forgotten attempts that had a lot of promise, but failed to capture the public's imagination. How many people have even heard of Elcaset, DCC, or SelectaVision, never mind having seen or used them? Yet these formats along with many others were foisted onto the market with plenty of fanfare by major electronics companies, only to flounder and eventually fail. There are specific reasons why they failed, and the backers of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc would do well to heed them if they want to avoid creating yet another white-elephant format. What follows are some of the most important lessons to be learned from the Ghosts of Formats Past.

 

1) Extreme copy protection
usually causes more problems
than it solves.
Heard of DVD-Audio or Super Audio CD? Probably not, yet both formats were touted earlier this decade as successors to the Compact Disc, each offering superbly detailed audio and music in surround sound. There are many factors to blame for the general lack of interest in the DVD-A and SACD, but it was probably the need to connect six(!) individual analog cables between the player and the rest of the system that convinced most everyday consumers to stick it out with their old-fashioned CDs. The record companies were so paranoid that a digital connection would make it too easy to clone a disc that they insisted on a hookup that required a spaghetti bowl of wires and a degree in electrical engineering to configure properly. Most people couldn't be bothered, so they stayed away.

Some other copy-protection schemes like Sony's XCP — which was put on some CDs last year and would install hidden rootkit software on any PC that tried to play them — and certain types of watermarking can cause troublesome playback on some equipment, while others result in discs that might not play at all in certain drives and may even cause them to lock up and fail. Not exactly a good way to win over customers.

For every type of data protection designed to foil the guy who wants to make a copy of his Legally Blonde disc to play in the summer house, there are thousands of teenage hackers figuring out a way to bust the code, and history has shown us that the hackers win most of the time. U.S. copyright law allows someone to make a copy of a protected work for their personal use, and if the developers of HD DVD and Blu-ray could find a copy-protection system that allows for personal one-off copies while preventing mass duplication by pirates, many of the code hackers would find other ways to kill time.

 

2) Fight your format battles
before coming to market.
Nobody likes format wars (certainly not anyone walking into a Best Buy), so why do they happen? Simple: corporate greed. Developing a successful format can mean big dollars for decades to come for the company that holds the license, so the competition to become the format of choice is huge. But the key to success is to settle any differences during the development phase, rather than slugging it out in the public marketplace. The two most successful formats of the last 20 years, DVD and CD, were both the result of a coming together of forces after intense competition between incompatible variations of similar concepts before they came to market.

While neither VHS or Betamax could really be considered a failure despite the eventual triumph of VHS (each format was dominant for a time, and both sold millions of recorders), some public format wars result in the premature death of both competitors. Back in the pre-iPod days of the early '90s, Sony and Philips waged an intense battle for the portable digital audio player market, introducing MiniDisc and Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) respectively. While DCC flopped almost from the start, MiniDisc never really caught the public's imagination in a major way either, although it remains as a fringe format today. Had there been just one choice, there's a good chance it would have been a success.

Another potential pitfall of a format war is the temptation to beat the other guy to the punch by bringing a product that hasn't yet been fully developed to market. We're already seeing this in the latest battle, with some of the first HD DVD players unable to output a 1080p signal, while at least one Blu-ray Disc player (Pioneer's BDP-HD1) can't play regular audio CDs. The format that eventually comes out on top will likely be the one that can deliver the full potential of HD discs: output video in 1080p format (to fit in with the new buzzword for TV manufacturers, "Full HD"), lets you record, and most importantly, has the support of the key movie studios. The studio issue is a key sticking point as GE-owned NBC Universal is currently firmly behind HD DVD (NBC Universal owns SCI FI and SCI FI Tech), while Sony Pictures — including MGM, Columbia TriStar, and United Artists — is naturally backing Blu-ray. While corporate alliances like these can be formidable, market forces are still stronger: in 1988, Sony saw the writing on the wall and started delivering VHS recorders.

 

3) Give people what they want.
In addition to Lesson 1, another element in the failure of DVD-Audio and SACD to catch on is that the buying public doesn't always put technical excellence before other features. While many golden-eared audiophiles can yak on for hours about the increased soundstage dimensionality and improved midrange transparency of those hi-rez formats, for 99% of consumers, good ol' regular CDs sound just fine, thank you very much. In a world where people tend to listen on the go rather than sit down in front of a fancy home audio rig, multichannel surround sound isn't much of a selling point either. The backers of DVD-Audio eventually tried to switch gears and follow DVD-Video's lead by promoting the format's ability to deliver additional content like pictures, text, and even some limited video footage, but it was all too little, too late.

SACD has one advantage in that it can be made as a hybrid disc that looks and feels just like a regular CD to most buyers, yet still contains a hi-rez audio layer to satisfy the audiophile crowd. Had it been sold at regular CD prices and filed in the standard CD bins in record stores, the format might have succeeded. But in reality, with the exception of a popular series of Rolling Stones reissues, most SACD hybrid releases remain forgotten in the remote and lonely audiophile section, way in the back of most record stores. While no standard DVD player can access the high-def content of Blu-ray or HD DVD discs, both camps have shown hybrid discs that incorporate a standard-definition layer. It would be a good idea if both formats went with hybrids — no one wants to see the creation of a new "videophile" bin in a dark corner of every Blockbuster.

 

4) Will it play my old stuff?
Almost all of the media we buy today comes on some form of 5-inch optical disc, so it's natural to assume that any machine which can handle the latest and greatest developments can also play the discs we already own. Unfortunately, it looks as if Pioneer has forgotten this with its first Blu-ray disc player the BDP-HD1, as it doesn't support the granddaddy of all 5-inch formats, regular music CDs. Having amassed an impressive library of music or movies at considerable expense, consumers get understandably annoyed at the thought of having to buy it all again in some new fancy format. Yes, we know that progress often requires a radically different way of doing things, making backwards compatibility difficult at best. But if Fisher could offer a CD changer that doubled as a turntable for LPs in the late '80s, surely today's manufacturers could find a way to make a player that's compatible with both Blu-ray and CD. Now admittedly, the BDP-HD1 is a premium $1,800 machine aimed squarely at early adopters, but the precedent it sets is a bit frightening.

 

5) Beware the ideas of Sony.
While it might seem unfair to single out one company in this discussion, it's hard to ignore the number of times Sony has gone ahead and shot itself in the foot with new format introductions. Certainly Sony has been a key player in the development of many of the most successful formats including CD, 3.5-inch floppy discs, and to a certain extent DVD, but when you go to check out the list of failed Sony's formats, it starts to read more like a novel. In addition to the previously discussed Betamax and SACD and MiniDisc, Sony has been behind several formats that never really caught on like UMD, Video8/Hi-8/Digital8, and Memory Stick, plus a bunch of outright failures like MicroMV, HiFD, and Elcaset.

Sony's eagerness to develop formats in-house is probably rooted in wanting to have a format as successful as the audio Compact Cassette, invented by Philips in the early '60s. Looking at all the formats that Sony has thrown into the marketplace, it's clear the company sees format licensing as an important potential profit center. It's interesting to note, however, that the most successful formats have been those that Sony developed in joint collaboration with other manufacturers. Blu-ray falls into this camp too, having been developed in collaboration with Samsung and Philips, so there are reasons to be optimistic.

 

Conclusion
HDTV is in about the same position today as color television was in the late 1950s — a special new technology used for only a few selected broadcasts, and available to a relatively small percentage of households. But just as color quickly became the de facto standard for all television, within a few years HD will be the norm for all video, with standard definition seeming like something from a prior era. With that in mind I have no doubt that HD video discs will succeed — it's just a question of which one. Right now, Blu-ray has the edge in terms of disc capacity and movie-studio backing, while HD DVD promises lower costs for both disc manufacturing (nice for studios) and HD DVD players (nice for you and me). But it looks like HD DVD has had a more successful first strike with Toshiba's introduction of the $500 HD-A1 (must have taken many sleepless nights to come up with that name) — especially considering Samsung's just-arrived BD-P1000 player sells for twice that price at $1,000. Still, Toshiba's machine can't output 1080p (at least not without an upgrade) while Samsung's can. But does anyone care? Unless you absolutely feel the need to slam dunk the Joneses yet again, my inclination at this point would be to wait a few months for things to settle down. Stay tuned.

— Michael Trei