Various high def DVD items

Best Buy has been named the top retailer of Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs "by a large margin", with Amazon at second place. Both companies attribute their leads to their informational approach to marketing, which aids consumer understanding of the technologies and the format war.

It is unsurprising that consumers are confused when the DVD Forum is close to approving a 51 GB HD-DVD disc. This would eliminate the main advantage of storage space that Blu-ray has over current HD-DVD discs. I prefer this to the HD-DVD group's previous competitive strategy of paying companies to use their product, as the consumer benefits greatly from this latest development.

Meanwhile, in the Blu-ray camp, they are giving away free Blu-ray discs with the purchase of a qualifying player. Once you buy the player you're pretty much locked to the format, and the studios know this. Universal has incorporated web-enabled HD-DVD features which extends HD-DVD's interactivity lead over Blu-ray and with higher capacity HD-DVD discs on the horizon, Blu-ray needs to fight with either marketing or technological advances. I'm hoping it will be the latter.

However, Sony is reporting that it has achieved high manufacturing yields nearing those of DVD. What that means is that there are fewer defects in the discs and so fewer discs have to be thrown away, resulting in lower manufacturing costs. The technological advances to HD-DVD could prove too confusing and expensive for the consumer so they may go with something cheaper and more reliable.

This war ain't over yet.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Saturday October 6 2007 9:35 AM to Industry, Hardware, DVD
Post ID: 52

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