the *existing* DVD standard, because those fucks in charge have decided yet again to "let the market decide", giving us another 15 years of the great war (33 vs. 45, beta vs vhs, ethernet vs. token ring, bluetooth vs 802.11, 18 different HD-TV standards).
Matsushita: Blu-Ray, HD-DVD Will Never Merge - Yahoo! News:
TOKYO, April 21 (Reuters) - The companies backing competing formats for next-generation DVD technology will never again talk about forming a unified standard, an executive at Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. said on Friday, leaving it to the consumer to choose the winning side.
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"We are not talking and we will not talk," Kazuhiro Tsuga, an executive officer at Matsushita, the world's largest consumer electronics maker, told Reuters in an interview. "The market will decide the winner."
I suggested, and appearantly Samsung is already on it, that like the HDTVs, someone should just byte the bullet (pun intentional) and come up with players that play both formats. Of course, with the patents involved, that will make the players more expensive and create a realm where "the market" won't decide - it'll be in the hands of the studios and what types of dvds they'll put out and what the video stores are willing to shelve because they *won't* be willing to hold 3 different types of everything considering they're already out there with PSP movies and have dropped VHS.
The big loser is any company that invested in PSP format, of course, but that was mostly Sony trying to monopolize their whole realm and that was a stupid thing to try to do. Expect Tower and others to drop that like a stone in the next few months.
Let the market decide only works to a point and experience is key - things get 50/50 by the early adopters, then one particular feature wins out, one killer app, in this case, one studio saying we're only supporting format X, and that's it -- it'll achieve the 85-15 level that marks the end-times until finally the losing format is just dropped unceremoniously. Beta/VHS held in that point for 6 *years* while video stores were stuck in a mode of wasted shelf space in fear of alienating too large a block of their customer base. It only got solved by the winner, VHS, dropping their prices to the point where having 2 vcrs was not only affordable, but recommended. 100% penetration followed.
The proof that "let the market decide" only hurts the market? HD-TV. The FCC decided to "let the market decide" rather than mandate a standard (which should have been their fucking *job* rather than playing censor to the world), resulting in 18 different "standards", and NOBODY was buying an HD-TV for a decade. Nobody bought because nobody would buy a TV of format X if it just happened that NBC (just to pick a name) chose format Y when they finally chose a format. Meanwhile, NBC wouldn't go HD because they didn't want to spend the money on a format if there weren't enough TVs and audience out there that would actually be able to watch their digital signal. The result: neither networks moved nor tvs sold. *everybody* lost money.
It finally all started to work when, like Samsung, manufacturers said to hell with it and put out TVs that supported all 18 standards. But that bumped up the price both for components and more so for the patent licenses for all of those standards. TVs were $1,000 more expensive than analog tvs of the same screensize solely on those patent licenses, for the better part of the last 4 years. Meanwhile the entire rest of Europe had been digital for a decade and is still laughing at the supposedly technically superior United States for remaining such a backwater of ancient history (after already laughing at us for making NTSC rather than PAL because we weren't willing to force people to buy a new TV...guess what happened a second time 4 decades later?)
So keep an eye on the studios or the retailers, because the independent device makers are going to make stuff that supports both and to hell with the jerks who can't make a fucking decision. Any big player studio (Disney, Fox, Columbia/Tristar) or retailer (Walmart, Blockbuster, FYE, Tower, Borders) announce that they are going to pick one and only one format and you'll see that format the winner. It won't be the market, it just won't be in the hands of the hd-dvd makers.
They gave up their chance to have a monopoly early and are forcing themselves, and us, to waste 50% of our money (and them facing sadly low sales in the holiday season because nobody wants to take that risk), when they could have had it all...
If you want to end this war quickly, write to Walmart or Disney today and tell them to pick one and only one.
(update: Yes, I was quite skeptical at the idea that either side would give up any advantage they might have had, but I held out a little hope that expierence might trump over this bullshit. You'd think knowing the results of the Prisoners' Dilemna might educate people more...)![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
