Format War Fallout - Echoes of Laserdisc?
One of my coworkers, who is older than me by a decade or so, held off on getting into the format war. He’s watched from the sidelines as I’ve bought my HD-DVD add-on drive, acquired a few movies, and then suffered through the end of HD-DVD as a viable format.
When we were talking about it recently, he told me that he did not want to see the format war end because the competition between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray had the effect of keeping prices lower, thus encouraging mainstream consumer adoption, and that this scenario had echoes of the Laserdisc format. When Laserdisc first hit the market, it was the first of its kind for optical media storage (think CD but as big as a record album) and the format was a big thing in Japan, and slightly less big of a thing in the United States. The discs carried greater video and audio fidelity than VHS tapes, and were poised to be the Next Big Thing. The only problem - lack of competition.
Because there wasn’t a competing format to Laserdisc, and the majority of players were manufactured by a handful of companies, player prices remained high and the Laserdisc fell into a niche category. Movie titles were more widely available overseas and had to be hunted down. Eventually, the Laserdisc would be replaced by the advent of DVD technology, which became popular and widely available to consumers, leading up to today’s market where you can pick up a DVD player for less than thirty dollars and movies for $4.99.
Having won the format war, we are already seeing the prices of Blu-Ray players starting to creep higher across all manufacturers...
