Remember Betamax? In the late 70s, my girlfriend had a Betamax player when not many people did. Me and my mate ‘Lucky Eddie’ used to rent movies and then charge our friends an entrance fee at my girlfriend’s house to watch. They and we were very popular since the movies we rented weren’t from the regular shelves in the video store, they were from the ‘Crisp Box’, if you get my drift.
A year after Betamax was introduced in ’75, VHS came along and the video war raged for about a decade. On the Betamax side were Sony, Toshiba, Sanyo, NEC, Aiwa, and Pioneer. On the VHS side were JVC, Matsushita, Panasonic, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sharp, and Akai. Even though Betamax was a better format, VHS won. A number of reasons were cited such as slicker marketing, ease of operation and recording length, but my personal opinion is that the VHS ‘Crisp Box’ became much larger and diverse than the Betamax ‘Crisp Box’. This ‘motivator’ has been responsible for a number of technology successes…
The war was over by the late 1980s, although Betamax continued on life-support until about ’93, and apparently the last Betamax machine was produced in Japan in ’02. I myself saw the writing on the wall in the early 80s and converted to a new and improved girlfriend format who had a VHS player. Lucky Eddie and I were back in business.
Sound familiar to today’s HD-DVD vs Blu-ray war? So, what are the differences? Are we on for Round 2? Who’s going to win? Who’s supporting which format? What are the implications?
The supporter’s have lined up and include the manufacturers for home theater and PCs, as well as the movie studios.
HD-DVD: Toshiba, LG, Thomson/RCA, Onkyo, Samsung; Microsoft, Intel, HP, NEC, Toshiba; Paramount, Studio Canal, Universal, Warner, Weinstein Company, DreamWorks Animation, First Look, Viacom, MTV, Nickelodeon; X Box 360.
Blu-ray: Sony, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, LG, Sharp, Panasonic, Samsung, Philips, Thomson/RCA; Apple, Dell, Benq, HP, LG, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Samsung, Sony, TDK; MGM, Columbia TriStar, Disney, Touchstone, Miramax, Fox, Warner, Lions Gate, Blockbuster Stores, Buena Vista; Playstation 3, Target supports Blu-ray hardware but sells both DVD formats.
I guess its a bigger war with more at stake. Frustratingly, there are more similarities than differences particularly if you look at the end result of resolution and audio quality, but: Blu-ray has a larger storage format, potentially up to 100GB compared to HD-DVD’s 45GB; HD-DVD currently has a more consolidated region encoding; Blu-ray players are more expensive; and err.. that’s about it. Blu-ray claims more interactive features, but that’s really because they have more storage available and have invested more in the authoring tools; both player’s grandfather-in the current formats; the HD-DVD format itself is closer to the current DVD format, Blu-ray discs have a more involved authoring process. All this is not very much to make a valued decision.
My Google ‘benchmark of popularity’ returns slightly more hits for Blu-ray than HD-DVD, so it really is too close to call. I’ll be waiting it out for as long I can stand not watching HD movies from Blockbuster, who support Blu-Ray, which let’s face it, is a cooler name. I’ll also be watching the HD-DVD and Blu-ray ‘Crisp Boxes’.
So here’s my issue with the whole HD thing. As much as I am mesmerized with, captivated by, and covert HD-TV, (yup, I haven’t been able to commit yet and I’m blaming the exorbitant piano-lesson fees), when ‘they’ asked the public what was wrong with Television, who said ‘The number of lines’? Why didn’t they say ‘no reruns’, ‘more action’, ‘less violence’, ‘less kissing’, etc.
Who was it who said: ‘Television is a medium – its called a medium because nothing is well-done.’? I’d like a +/- button for better plot-twists, an on/off button for ‘Hollywood Ending’ and an on/off button to remove annoying character-actor from scene.
The whole subtext to HD is that it’ll soon be time to say goodbye to your VHS player and to your analogue TV. Anybody still have one of these? At home? Maybe. In your institution? Probably. In about a year’s time analogue broadcast stops in the U.S. – February 17th, 2009 to be precise – you can thank ‘The Decider’ for that. And we’re not alone. Have you tried to buy an analogue TV recently? Both Target and Walmart are now posting analogue TV caveat signs in their electronics departments. Analogue broadcasting has ceased in Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Finland; Is ceasing as we speak in Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Austria and the UK; and pretty much everywhere else will begin decommissioning within a year or so, just like us. Two thirds of U.S. households are expected to have HDTV by 2010. I plan to join the ranks after Christmas.
But what about interpretive hardware in museums? If your institution relies on VHS video, you probably need to start planning for a conversion, it may not be long before support for your equipment and format disappears, which will be fine until you have a hardware problem. Then you’ll be forced to buy a HD flat-screen TV – dang.
Six months ago, my puny 37″ Sony Trinitron fizzled out. I confidently announced that if we could fix it for $300 we would, otherwise it would make ‘economic sense’ to spend $3,000 on a 50″ LCD HDTV. The repair fee was $270 – bugger. January Sales – here I come…
November 29th, 2007 01:56
“…when ‘they’ asked the public what was wrong with Television, who said ‘The number of lines’?”
“No one said ‘the number of lines per screen’.” I vividly remember this quote, from an interview with some genius who previously had worked at Disney. To this day, I wish I could remember his name, or where I saw the article. It was brilliant. His point was that “what’s wrong with Television” is the content, the lack of good story-telling, which is what television is for.
November 29th, 2007 10:42
If there’s a definitive source for this, I’d love to know. I first heard it as an interview question in about June ’88 at the BBC’s Interactive Television Unit. Naturally I thought it was an opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of PAL vs SECAM and the Beeb’s current engineering research. Alas it was not. I got the lecture about interactivity, engagement and the future of TV, but I also got the job.
After three months, Michael Checkland, then Director General of the Beeb, decided in his infinite wisdom that Interactive Television was not the future – neither was mine at the BBC – but I guess the number of lines were.
December 2nd, 2007 05:54
But of course, even apocryphally (neologism alert), it wasn’t the public that ‘they’ asked; when ‘they’ asked the question “what’s wrong with TV?”, ‘they’ asked themselves, and the answer, correctly, was that (at least in the west) pretty much everyone who wanted one had one, and had no need to buy a new one. Market saturation. That’s what was wrong with TV.
Last time that happened they added colour. Flat screens with demonstrably worse pictures than CRT wasn’t going to be a universal solution to that problem; digital encoding was a fine thing from many angles, but since you can add a $20 box to your existing TV, still didn’t solve the real problem that most people had no compelling reason to replace their existing TVs, which just don’t break as fast as they used to. HD is the new colour, and solves (for now) a real problem for the industry.
December 2nd, 2007 06:02
A sidelight cast from the VHS/Betamax intro, to the ‘what people really want’ outro: according to that reliable source of record Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war) the deciding factor was not the poor selection of porn on Betamax, but that what people really wanted was longer recording times for fewer dollars. In other words picture quality was the least important aspect.