Consumers pay the price in format wars

NET RESULTS:While some will be celebrating the news that the film industry seems to have settled firmly on Sony's BluRay format for high-definition (HD) DVD over its key competitor, Toshiba's HD-DVD, there will of course be casualties in this latest of technology format wars.

Many people will have bought a pricey HD-DVD machine, guessing that it would be a long time before any conclusion would be reached in the battle for a standard.

And there will be those who never knew there was a battle to begin with and are stunned to find out that, just like buyers of Sony's Betamax video format in a previous era, they now own electronics that will be mothballed.

Given the relatively short lifespan for most electronics equipment, it is really not the device but the media that will cause people the most headaches. The devices may still work, but most people these days tend to upgrade entertainment equipment fairly regularly, rather than sadly using the same VCR for over a decade, like me (and I confess to only just getting a basic DVD player). However, people keep their film and television show libraries for ages - or at least, they hope to do so.

My parents opted for Betamax (rather than the lower quality VHS format) and ended up with an obsolete library of films, and found it increasingly hard to get blank tapes to make recordings of television shows.

While they could buy close-out Betamax films from local video rental stores, after a while, one had to question the value of buying a nice library of shows that - once the Betamax machine died - could no longer be watched.

So they had to get a VHS video recorder too, and their lovely, high-end Betamax unit was retired to the bedroom TV and used mostly for taping NYPD Blue, LA Law, St Elsewhere and the other shows of that era much loved by my father.

Plenty of HD-DVD machines are about to suffer that same fate, as Toshiba already has announced it will cut losses and stop production (which sent Toshiba shares up).

Standards and formats drive consumers and the industry crazy. People wonder why the companies cannot just anoint a format for music, film, DVDs and so on from the very start, thus making life easier - and less expensive for those of us who bet on the wrong format.

But unfortunately technology doesn't work that way. Generally, some company or individual innovates and establishes the possibility of a type of device or medium which is initially very expensive to produce and only purchased by early adopters. Some other companies come in quickly and start to do R&D around the concept and produce competing, often improved technologies.

Two and often more formats or standards then go on the market and - as with high-definition DVD - it can take a painfully long time for either the consumer market or influential industries and retailers to zero in on the format of choice.

Determining a format immediately would, arguably, shut down innovation, as it takes time to figure out what format is superior. Or is that a load of waffle? Technology is full of examples of superior technologies that didn't win, Betamax being one of the most obvious examples.

Or Apple. The first Mac was far superior in form and function to the existing PCs, which hobbled along with a command line interface (rather than a visual, Windows-based interface). It took Microsoft years to offer a Windows-based environment - and many still feel the Mac remains more innovative in form and function than the PC.

But with both Macs and Betamax, cost to the consumer was (and has remained) the influential factor determining the mass market format. Consumers may like "nice", but they prefer "nice enough" at a lower cost.

With BluRay and HD-DVD, the battle ended up being fought not in the consumer home but in the film studios and mega-retailers. When, recently, the balance of big Hollywood film companies opted for BluRay, causing some of the big consumer retailers to focus on stocking and selling the format, most felt it was simply a short matter of time before BluRay reigned. The decision was made for the consumer - interestingly, a reverse of the Betamax scenario.

Toshiba aimed its HD-DVD at the "nice enough" market to keep it cheap and cheerful for the mass retailers but, this time, Sony won with what many consider a superior technology.

Meanwhile, a whole sector has suffered. HD has failed to really take off yet, with analysts primarily blaming consumers who were reluctant to set the market in motion until they knew what they should be buying. And in a free market, no one has yet to come up with a better way of dealing with this recurring format/standards headache.

blog: www.techno-culture.com