Slashdot Mirror
Gizmodo Declares Blu-Ray Winner
13.7BillionYears writes "Gizmodo has a special feature covering the many details of the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle based on the technical, financial, and commercial merits of the two contenders. They conclude that Blu-Ray is the clear winner on all three fronts. Hopefully the movie industry and electronics manufacturers will see the same logic and avert a format war."
Did you read the bit where he said HD-DVD has NO web page yet?
And resistant to consumer damage - What the hell does that have to do with ANYTHING? It comes down to hardware/media price and avialiablity.
If 33%+ of the movie libaries are availiable in Blu-Ray, and NONE are availiable in HD-DVD - which would you image might be a more attractive purcahse? Even if HD-DVD discs can be run over by a truck and the Blu-Ray discs have to be kept in nitrogen cannisters between playing, the format that will get consumer marketshare is blindingly obvious.
Finally, I would say that he did give a numbre of details for technical advantages of the HD-DVD format - which have then been met and worked around by the Blu-Ray companies.
Sometimes an underdog is really, well, just a dog.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
which standard has the less patents attached? I would chose that.
Advice for savvy high-tech consumers:
STAY 5 TO 10 YEARS BEHIND TECHNOLOGICALLY
(less for computers, but same idea)
That way, when the early adopters are through spending their hard-earned cash on stillborn formats and their latest-and-greatest readers, and a format emerges as the winner, and a couple of clever hackers devise a way to get around the media companies' "niceties" (zoning anybody), then you'll enjoy dirt-cheap players and a great variety of content.
Of course, the next SuperDuperThingamabobEverybodyNeeds[TM] will already be there, but don't think for one second you need to stress over getting current, that's an artificial feeling created by PR hype from the format pushers. You'll get the shit a lot cheaper than your neighbour in a few years, no worries...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Since most people will recognize HD-DVD must be somehow better than DVD while Blu-Ray could be anything from enhanced color laundry detergent to insecticide. Without a ton of marketing and consumer education Blu-Ray will simple lose when the average couch potato goes to buy a new player from the local electronics megabarn.
While this has little to do with why BetaMax (nor why every other Sony proprietary standard has failed), Blu-Ray has some serious marketing problems to over come.
"Hopefully the movie industry and electronics manufacturers will see the same logic and avert a format war."
Why?
Look what happened with DVDs. Computer DVDs were pushed back for a long time while we waited for the movie industry to work out their copyright stuff. What if the computer industry and movie industry chose different standards this time? Wouldn't that allow the computer industry to move ahead with new technologies instead of waiting for the movie industry to catch up?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Which is why the Dreamcast is king today.
Seriously folks, the format war ended when Sony announced the PS3 would support it. With many millions of Blu-Ray capable players already virtually guaranteed to be sold in the U.S. and Japan, no content producer has to worry about the installed base of players. It'll happen. The fact that Blu-Ray happens to hold far more than HD-DVD at this point is little more than a huge bonus for us geeks.
A similar thing happened in Japan when the PS2 came out. DVDs were having trouble in that country because they were competing with laserdiscs, which were more popular there than the U.S. I know a lot of people that were frustrated by the slow adoption of DVDs there, but once the PS2 came out and 2 million Japanese consumers suddenly had DVD players, the Japanese studios started releasing shows on DVD much faster.