Blue-Ray and HD-DVD to merge?
One has to wonder if the new management at Sony is responsible for a lot of interesting decisions coming out of the consumer and media products giant. While all people had its eyes targeted on a mud throwing adventure alá VHS vs. Betamax Toshiba and Sony seemed to have agreed - after only three years - to unify the upcoming high density, high quality DVD standard. Both of the competing companies now believe that a market adoption is vitally dependent on the simplification of the format - and two are twice as hard to swallow for customers then one. No it will be utterly interesting to see what comes out of this as about any detail of the two specs where different. Once could hold 50 GB (Blue-Ray) one only 25 GB (HD-DVD) one was to use Quicktime Container, MPEG-4 and AAC (Blue-Ray) and one Microsofts VC-9 codec (Windows Media 9). The concept, supporters and believers of both could not be more different - to unify those will be a task not so easy as it looks. I always was hoping for a market shakeout as Sonys format had already a head start with recorders and players available and the "better" guys and the better tech in the team. I always thought that competition would drive better technology even if it means that sometimes you are on the wrong side of the table and have made a wrong investment.
The outcome is kinda speculative - either you have cheap discs that can only hold 25GB with expensive sony drives to burn and read them and Microsoft DRM on em or you have expensive discs that hold 50GB with cheap drives from toshiba and still Microsoft DRM on them. I think the consumer will be the one who will benefit the least from this - but I love to be proofed wrong on this.
old arstechnica take on it:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050419-4824.html
new arstechnica take on it:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050421-4835.html