DVD War is ON!!

The DVD format war between Toshiba’s HD-DVD and Sony’s Blu Ray is on, after talks on peace failed, reports Yahoo! News. As earlier observed, Sony showed its interest in talks to get to a solution from which both the companies can benefit but Toshiba walked out after Sony refused to agree to a jointly developed format & they won’t agree to Toshiba’s format either, meaning plainly that they want nothing but their own format, and it looks now that the talks were futile from the moment they started as Sony didn’t want to settle on anything else. 👿

Indeed, a Sony spokesman Taro Takamine was quoted as saying

While Sony remains open to discussion with the Toshiba bloc, the firm’s goal is to agree on a single format, not a jointly developed one. We have no intention on settling on a compromised format that only plays back 20 gigabytes, for example.

So why bother with the talks then, one may ask, surely they didn’t expect Toshiba to take up Sony’s Blu Ray just like that!! Had it been the case, well, there wouldn’t have been a dispute in the first place, thus eliminating the need to talk for a mutually beneficial solution.

But then, its them who’ll be the hard hit by this dispute, as people won’t be likely to buy 2 DVD players, one each for Blue-Ray & HD-DVD!! Nor will the movie stores stock DVDs in two formats, so the Hollywood studios behind Sony & Toshiba will give this a serious thought as adopting one technology would mean cutting off the users with the other technology resulting in loss in revenues & they would be unlikely to adopt both formats to produce DVDs in both formats for a single title, the cost will be something to think about.

The cost is indeed gonna be a huge factor for the people as well, as Toshiba spokeswoman Junko Furuta acknowledged.

A unified format does not look likely for the time being. Blu-ray disks will be harder to adopt for use in laptop computers, as well as in car navigation systems that are popular in Japan.
We have doubts as to whether the Blu-ray format is a viable technology in terms of production cost. We’re also not convinced that consumers would need to store so much data on disks, especially now that internal hard drives are more popular.

2 points for the lady, she’s got it right. People will be more likely to stick with a format which will incur them less cost of upgrade, which will be Toshiba’s HD-DVD, because while Sony’s Blue-Ray DVDs will be able to hold 5GB of more data than Toshiba’s HD-DVD, the cost of production of Blue-Ray DVDs is much higher than HD-DVDs and the equipment cost is also quite high, ofcourse Sony has always been popular for less features at more cost, they’ve never believed in providing the customer more for their money, forget it, they’ve never believed in even giving the value for the cost.

Then there’s also the fact that the difference between the two formats is of 5GB, not something highly significant when you consider that HD-DVD allows upto 20GB of storage & Blu-Ray allows 25GB of storage. Blu-Ray’s advantage of 5GB over HD-DVD is somewhat negated by the fact that Hard-Disks are becoming insanely cheap every week, so people can increase their Hard-Disk storage more & also get external Hard-Drives, which can be plugged in USB ports, to carry their data around.

Toshiba’s HD-DVD players will be available by the end of this year while people will be able to see the first of Blu-Ray with Sony’s Playstation 3 which will be available sometime in the mid-2006.

All that remains to be seen is what comes out of this Format War and if these people get enough sense to stop bickering at each other and come to a common format to make any sales!!