About 25 years ago, a battle went on in the tech industry. The first VCR’s were becoming cheap enough for the general public to be affordable. Every brand promoted it’s own standard and after a long battle between Philips’ Betamax and Sony’s VHS formats, VHS came out as the victor. Supposedly because Sony allowed porn to be brought out on VHS, while Philips refused to do so.

A decade later, Philips decided it wouldn’t fall into the same trap again, and successfully formed an alliance with Sony to develop the DVD standard, the most popular format for video and games today. A few years ago, some of the major Asian brands decided it was time for a disc that could hold even more data. As was the case with VHS and Betamax, various standards were developed. Over the last few years HD DVD, led by Toshiba, has been fighting Sony’s Blu-Ray disc.

Last month, Toshiba gave up, losing the battle. This time not thanks to porn, but thanks to Sony’s popular Playstation 3 game console and costly alliances with major Hollywood production studio’s like Universal and Warner Bros.

All this pretty much escaped the general public, neither of the two standards was promoted very much, at least not in Europe. The clue here is that nobody’s actually waiting for this to happen: DVD offers us movies at a quality most people regard as excellent, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 proves next generation games will fit on “old-fashioned” DVD’s just fine.

Even Sony’s - usually very competent - marketing division seems to have trouble selling their product, as you can see form this clip. Although I’m all for technical improvements, I’m all against stuff I don’t really need. Well, there’s no stopping it now: Blu-ray will simply be forced down our throats…

Filed under: Computers, Informative, Uncategorized