Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 3, 2007. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The Blu-ray group around Sony is basking in the sales figures for the PS3 game console, with which 1.3 million built-in Blu-ray players have now been shipped in Europe. The HD-DVD group around Toshiba and Microsoft, on the other hand, is celebrating the switch of Hollywood studios Paramount and Dreamworks to its camp and is following up in a new round of price cuts with players below the 290-euro threshold. Where there are winners, there should actually also be losers. But at the IFA, none of those involved wants to back down. «We are running a marathon here, not a sprint», says Olivier van Wynendaele, spokesman for the European HD-DVD Promotion Group. One has to reckon on four to five years for the distance.
Format wars are nothing new in the consumer electronics industry. In particular, the dispute over the video-cassette format at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s has burned itself deeply into the industry’s memory. At that time, the companies JVC, Sony and Philips competed against each other with the formats VHS, Betamax and Video 2000. Ultimately, JVC prevailed with the technically weakest format, the VHS cassette. Against this background, those involved in the current controversy know that technical quality alone cannot convince. Buyers of a DVD successor system are supposed to be able to firmly assume that enough suppliers of high-resolution content will be available for their choice in the future. «Since TV broadcasters in Europe have so far offered hardly any HD programmes, that plays an even greater role for us than, for example, in the USA», says van Wynendaele.
Despite Paramount and Dreamworks’ decision to switch against Blu-ray, behind which the HD-DVD opponents suspect shady subsidy deals, neither camp can declare itself the winner. Blu- ray has outstripped the competition in disc sales in Europe by a ratio of 3:1, says Thilo Röhrig, spokesman for the «Blu-ray Group Germany». In Germany, Blu-ray is ahead 2:1 in film sales. The HD-DVD camp counters with a study according to which, statistically, only 0.5 discs have so far been sold per Blu-ray player. By contrast, 3.5 discs have been sold per HD-DVD- Player. Blu-ray lists more than 300 film titles in Europe, including films from Senator, Universum and Kinowelt, while HD-DVD even lists around 400. Blu-ray presents «Neues vom Wixxer», HD-DVD the Cologne concert by Herbert Grönemeyer.
The HD-DVD group expects impetus from the Canadian-Chinese supplier Venturer Electronics, which with a new player will for the first time undercut the threshold of 290 euros for an HD-DVD player. Blu-ray, on the other hand, hopes that its format will also prevail among amateur filmmakers. At the IFA in Berlin, Hitachi presented a camcorder that stores film recordings in full quality («Full HD») on Blu-ray discs. But neither the cheaper HD-DVD- Player from China nor the Blu-ray camcorder will knock out the opponent. Jordi Ribas, who represents Microsoft in the HD-DVD group, can now also imagine that there does not necessarily have to be a showdown between the two formats. It would not be the first time that two formats permanently existed in parallel in consumer electronics. «But consumers have also learned to make a choice, for example between plasma and LCD technology for flat-panel displays.» So-called hybrid players, which can play both HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs, could point to a way out. At the IFA, Samsung presented a hybrid player as the second company. The pioneer, the South Korean company LG Electronics, announced a second generation of devices by the end of the year. The beauty flaw of the combo players, however, is that they cost as much as some devices of the two rival formats combined.
