Slow News Day

In a recent survey of HDTV owners by NPD Group, a full 73% were satisfied with the picture quality provided by upconverted DVDs for them to become too interested in a high-definition disc player of either format. Other figures are equally shocking, suggesting that the high-def format war may already be over. BetaNews spoke at length with the NPD report's author, analyst Ross Rubin.

If there were just one universally embraced format for high-definition video discs, it would most likely have been introduced just over two years ago, probably at the $1,200 price point. By the spring of 2006, the budget-priced versions would have appeared at around $699.

The video game console manufacturers would have been racing to be the first, and the best, to bring the format to market. Their competitive breakthroughs might have driven the stand-alone console price to $399. And today, we would have probably been trumpeting the entry of low-price manufacturers from China, ready to flood world markets with $150 models.

This is how it might have been. Unfortunately, groups of intellectual property rights holders with dueling portfolios have maintained the present state of stalemate between two high-def formats, Blu-ray and HD DVD, whose physical and technical distinctions from one another are perhaps notable, though often trivial.

We are well beyond the point in time where we should have been talking about the new, single high-def format eclipsing that critical juncture that marketers and analysts search for, that peak period when titles for high-def exceed those for first-generation DVD. Instead, we're still treating the owners of the first- and second-generation high-def consoles as early adopters, and every other customer as a potential market.

Among those early adopters, infighting remains fierce as they strive desperately to discover whatever new justification may remain, like shrinking mud puddles in a hot desert, for the investments they've already made. Their collective dissatisfaction is the clearest sign that the true potential for both formats has never been realized.

It is a sad end for a hopeful technology, perhaps the last generation of discs for distributing movies. However, it looks to be a long and dreary end, as the champions of both formats remain unwilling to concede any ground.