Both high definition disc formats have now been on sale for most of a year and the honest summary of the war so far is that the customer has declined to participate.
HD DVD arrived first, in April, at around five hundred dollars for Toshiba’s player. Blu-ray followed in June at roughly twice that. Both were early hardware in the way that early hardware always is: slow to load, prone to firmware issues, and considerably less pleasant to live with than the DVD player already under the television. Neither format has sold discs in numbers anybody wants to publish prominently.
The studio split is what makes this genuinely difficult rather than merely tedious. Universal is exclusive to HD DVD. Disney, Fox and Sony are exclusive to Blu-ray. Warner and Paramount are hedging by releasing on both, which is expensive and which they will not do forever. So there is no player you can buy that plays everything, and the deciding factor for most households is not which format is technically superior but whether they care more about one studio’s catalogue than another’s. That is a terrible basis for a purchase and everybody involved knows it.
The consoles are the interesting weapon. Sony has put a Blu-ray drive inside every PlayStation 3, which means the format ships in volume regardless of whether anybody wanted it, funded by people who were buying a games machine. Microsoft has taken the opposite approach and sells an HD DVD drive as a two hundred dollar accessory, which is more honest and considerably less effective, because accessories attach at rates that would embarrass you.
I have written before that Sony bolted a format war onto a games console and asked players to fund it. Standing here in December, I think it is also the single smartest thing Sony has done this year. It is the only mechanism either side has for getting hardware into millions of homes quickly, and Toshiba has no equivalent.
Technically there is less between the formats than the marketing suggests. Blu-ray holds more per layer. HD DVD was cheaper to manufacture because the production lines were closer to existing DVD tooling. Both use the same video codecs and at sensible bitrates a viewer is not going to identify which is which from the sofa. Anybody claiming a decisive picture quality difference is selling something.
What I do not think either camp has confronted is that this fight is being conducted on the assumption that people want to own films on discs, and that assumption is quietly eroding. Video moved online this year faster than anybody expected. The picture quality is dreadful and it is getting better, and the convenience gap is enormous and getting wider. Two companies are spending a fortune arguing about which optical disc wins while the medium itself is being questioned.
My advice to anybody asking is to buy neither and wait, which is the least satisfying advice in consumer electronics and also obviously correct. There is no urgency, the players will be cheaper and better next year, and there is a real possibility that whichever format wins gets to be the last one.