HD-DVD vs. BlueRay - The winner is.... perhaps neither

Michael Gartenberg | July 05, 2006, 10:56 AM

While some enthusiasts are calling the market for HD-DVD, it's not quite clear to me that these folks are correct. I say this as an enthusiast (believe me, I've bought gadgets in the past you've never even heard of) and this thing doesn't pass my second law of consumer electronics.

Unlike some of our colleagues at other firms, who have called a winner, than changed their prediction and then changed it again, we haven't said who think will win the war for HiDef optical disks. That's because what the analysis we see in the data we collect tells us consumers aren't that interested.

In the past we've talked about the difficulty involved in launching new formats.

First, you need broad hardware support. In this case, there's anything but. You have vendors on both sides of the marketplace, selling equipment at high price points combined with a format war. In short, not a compelling value proposition for most consumers.

Second, you need deep content support. At the moment, there's far more content available on DVD than on either one of these formats and that's not something that's going to change to quickly. Let's face it, unless you're a really big fan of the "Fifth Element" and the ability to show it off on HD,

Third, you need a clear and visible consumer value proposition. CDs and DVDs both offered this value proposition clearly to consumers. There was a clear visible difference in the experience that was easily grasped by consumers. Both were marked by moving from analog tape format to disk, which was more reliable and offered novel features such as random access to content (remember how much fun it was trying to skip around songs on a cassette. Both offered clear quality differences than what came before (except to my six friends who still swear by their vinyl LPs and tube amps) and the quality was well above the threshold for just noticeable differences. When I look at the best content on HD-DVD or BlueRay it just doesn't look that much better (if better at all) than a good DVD player with an scaler.

So who's going to win? Well, at the moment, the savvy consumer who holds off their purchase is clearly the winner in the short term. In the long run, there may be no winner. The last time two formats fought a battle like this over incremental quality in the audio arena, it was SACD against DVD-Audio. We know the winner in that battle wasn't either one. It was the lesser than CD quality MP3 and the iPod that took over.