HD DVD vs. Blu-ray
Betamax vs. VHS, replayed for the HDTV age. Toshiba's HD DVD was cheaper; Sony's Blu-ray held more and came inside every PlayStation 3. Two years, one Warner Bros. press release, and it was over.
Both formats grew out of the same blue laser diode, whose shorter wavelength packed far more data onto a disc than a DVD's red one. Sony's side became Blu-ray, announced on February 19, 2002, by a consortium of nine electronics makers. The DVD Forum, chaired by Toshiba, balked at the cost, and Toshiba and NEC's rival "Advanced Optical Disc" was adopted as HD DVD in 2003 — but only after being voted down twice, and after the HD DVD camp added members and changed the Forum's voting rules, which drew scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice. Blu-ray held more; HD DVD could be pressed on existing DVD lines. Unification talks in 2005 collapsed on August 22 over the interactivity layer — Java versus Microsoft's HDi — and over the royalties Blu-ray's members stood to lose.
HD DVD players and discs reached U.S. stores on April 18, 2006; Blu-ray titles followed on June 20, in near-identical translucent cases, red for one and blue for the other. The studios split three apiece — Universal, Paramount and Warner Bros. for HD DVD; Sony, Disney and Fox for Blu-ray — and Microsoft sold an HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360, for movies only. Sony's decisive move was building a Blu-ray drive into every PlayStation 3 at ruinous cost: the console launched at $500, was estimated to cost more than $800 to build, and Sony acknowledged roughly $3.3 billion in PS3 hardware losses through mid-2008. But by the time the war ended about 10.5 million PS3s had sold against an estimated 1 million HD DVD players, and Blu-ray discs outsold HD DVD two to one in the United States.
Retail followed. Blockbuster went Blu-ray-only in June 2007 after a 250-store test in which more than 70 percent of high-definition rentals were Blu-ray, and Target dropped HD DVD players the next month. Toshiba's counterpunch — Paramount and DreamWorks Animation going HD DVD-exclusive that August — turned out to have come with a reported $150 million in incentives. In November the AVS Forum shut its HD disc boards over "physical threats that have involved police." On January 4, 2008, Warner Bros. announced it would drop HD DVD by June; Toshiba slashed player prices 40 to 50 percent, and within six weeks Best Buy, Netflix and Walmart had abandoned the format, the New York Times running a mock obituary.
Toshiba conceded on February 19, 2008, ending player development, manufacturing and marketing; Universal switched that day and Paramount the next. Warner later offered a "Red2Blu" trade-in of up to 25 HD DVDs for the price of shipping. The victory was smaller than it looked: standalone Blu-ray player sales barely moved that spring, $70 upconverting DVD players kept selling against $300 Blu-ray decks, and streaming was arriving to make the whole fight feel like the last physical-media war.
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