How Blu-ray lost, then won, and may lose again

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By Kevin Ohannessian May 14, 2008
By early January, everyone knew that the end was near for HD-DVD. At the annual Consumer Electronics Show, Time Warner announced that its Warner Bros. film studio would no longer support both high definition film formats and that it would go exclusively Blu-ray. Six weeks later, after a series of defections, Toshiba announced that it would no longer manufacture or market the HD-DVD format. These events were the end of a war that waged for two years, costing consumers and companies millions that they spent on a soon-to-be obsolete technology. To really understand what happened, you need to start at the beginning.

The year was 1993 and two distinct groups representing various electronics companies came together to create a successor to the CD. It would be a new format that would offer the ability to save and distribute music, as well as film and computer data. Sony led the formation of one group, while Toshiba parented several companies in another. The two groups worked individually until collaborating in 1995 to develop a standard format called DVD. Many news reports surfacing at the time highlighted how much the union of the two camps benefitted the industry by preventing a format war like that of VHS vs. Betamax in the late 70s.

By March 1997, Toshiba made the first DVD player available for consumers in America, while Sony and other companies followed in the ensuing months. The first full year that DVD was available, almost 1 million players were purchased, with more than 14 million discs sold in the U.S, according to industry association DEG. By 2001 the numbers of players purchased had ballooned to 16.7 million, the number of discs to more than 300 million.

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