Some thoughts on HD DVD

So another big name has jumped ship - or rather, has jumped on to the fence. LG announced today that it would support both HD DVD and Sony's Blu-Ray DVD standards in it's players. This is certainly a blow to Sony, who just 6 months ago looked like they had an insurmountable advantage in the standard wars. These days, it looks more and more like at the very least we'll see bi-compatible players be the norm. Sony - being the usual retards that they are - will refuse to make bicompatible players, and will thus lose market share.

I won't pretend to have Robert Cringely's chops when it comes to predictions, but this is something I've given a lot of thought to lately, so I thought I'd share. I don't think the next generation of digital video discs is going to take off the way DVD did. First of all, both HD DVD and Blu-ray are supposed to be backwards compatible, which is convenient for the consumer but not necessarily great for the studios. People won't have the incentives to replace the large libraries that they already have, for two reasons: a) for many movies, the advantage of HD DVDs over DVDs won't be enough to buy new copies, and b) replacing old TVs with HD-TVs will continue to be a costly proposition for most people.

Meanwhile, there's a number of examples where people have in fact chosen inferior standards because they offer more of what the customer wants - MP3 players are a perfect example. Any vinyl-phile will tell you that CDs sound worse than vinyl, and MP3s are themselves worse than CD. But they aren't so much worse that people won't use them. Similarly, look at examples of downloaded television. The best pirated TV you can download is still inferior to broadcast, but it offers a number of advantages that some consumers (yes, thieves) prefer. Hell, people pay for TV on their iPods, and the video is crap.

This is important because the demographic that would normally be most likely to be an early HD DVD adopter is the same demo that is going backwards, from a video quality measure.

So in short, I don't think HD DVDs will take off. They'll sell well enough, but we won't see anything like the growth we've seen with DVDs. And that's a good thing, because Hollywood can only make me buy Apollo 13 so many times, the bastards.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that we're in early days, I think Sony is going to lose this standards war. The BR players are going to be too expensive, I don't think the PS3 is going to sell as well as the X-Box, and the same people who should have bought the PS3 may still be pissed off at Sony for trying to break their computers last year.

It's really a miracle - a company has managed to be so completely boneheaded and hostile to its customers that Bill Gates looks user-friendly. Sony, you've managed to raise Lazarus. We salute you. Now piss off.