Blu-ray won the right to fight DVD

The format war ended in February and Blu-ray won it comprehensively. Seven months later the prize turns out to be the right to compete against DVD, which is a much harder opponent than the one it just beat.

DVD is good enough. Not adequate, genuinely good enough, for the screen sizes most people own and the distance they sit from them. It costs nothing extra because the player is already there, discs are five pounds in a supermarket, and every home has a machine that reads them. Nobody is dissatisfied with DVD, and dissatisfaction is what a replacement format needs.

Last October I argued that Toshiba could not outspend a subsidy funded by a games division, and that turned out right. What I did not think through is that the same subsidy explains the position now.

Most Blu-ray drives in homes arrived inside a games console bought for other reasons. That was decisive for winning the format war, because it placed hardware faster than any player manufacturer could sell it. It is much less useful for selling discs, because a person who acquired the capability incidentally has no particular appetite to spend twenty-five pounds exercising it.

So the installed base is large and the attachment rate is not, and those two numbers get reported as though the first predicts the second.

Then there is what has been happening while the two camps fought each other. Connections got faster. Set-top boxes started offering films directly. None of it is good enough yet, the catalogues are thin and the quality is below disc, but the direction is not in doubt, and every month spent arguing about which shiny disc wins was a month not spent competing with the thing that requires no disc at all.

My expectation is that Blu-ray does fine and never becomes what DVD was. It settles as the format for people who care about picture quality and want to own things, which is a real market and a fraction of the one DVD had.

Winning a format war is only valuable if there is still a format worth owning at the end of it, and that question was being decided elsewhere the whole time.