There have been a series of articles pop up today hinting at talks taking place between Sony and Toshiba to consolidate Blu-Ray and HD-DVD into a single high-definition video disc standard (I'll call it HDVD just for the moment). The Digital Bits posted links to five different articles ( Japan Today , MSNBC , WebProNews , NewsFactor , and of course Reuters ) all reporting on it. It's also popped up on Slashdot . The Japan Today article suggests that an agreement to merge the two formats into a single format (similar to what happened back in the 90's to yield the DVD format that we all know so well now) could come as soon as next week.

If this turns out to be true, it's great news for the consumer - nobody wants a format war, and a single format that draws on the strengths of both technologies would be an awesome way to achieve HD on a disc. But it is happening pretty much at the eleventh hour (with Toshiba trying to roll out HD-DVD before the end of the year and Sony following with Blu-Ray early next year), so I'm going to have to remain more dubious than optimistic until a formal announcement of a real agreement arrives.

The committed manufacturers whose products are already in testing/production are probably not as happy as we are.

Of course, that just means the cost of redevelopment gets passed on to the early adopters, as usual. I expect the $1K pricing announced for several models is too optimistic for any possible "consolidated standard" players.

A little more cropping up about this. There's this article at Yahoo!, and according to this article at Reuters Panasonic and Philips have both joined it on the talks.

Does anyone recall what the deciding factors were that led to the success of VHS and failure of Beta? If I remember correctly Beta was considered the superior product, I think, because of PQ?

VHS beat Beta because of, a) Sony's desire to keep Beta proprietary rather than create an "open standard," (i.e., they got greedy), and, b) marketing. Sony by themselves could just not compete when the entire rest of the world went in the direction of VHS. Yes, Betamax was a superior product and technology.

Don't forget the Porn industry chose VHS! JIm

hullguy hit on the real reason why VHS took over. seriously though, he is correct that the porn industry played a huge part in the move to VHS.

Off topic, but the porn industry also buoyed the laserdisc market through the 80's.

It's all in the details, apparently.

Perhaps they have taken a cue to the disappointing sales of SACD and DVD Audio. That format war may have been a contributing factor to consumer indifference and disinterest in either format.

I think consumers are pretty tired of having to replace their collections every few years and we need to know something will be here for a while if we are going to spend our hard earned dough on it. I was prepared to ignore HDDVD for a while until a winner prevailed but now I may take a quicker look at it if they unite formats.

I thought the two formats, HDdvd and Bluray were mutually incompatible. Any gearheads have an idea of how the two camps could integrate their technologies? ( About a month ago I wrote a letter to Robert Hartley, editor of The Perfect Vision who answered that a "universal" player including both formats was impossible for some reason.) What compromise is possible?

Jay

JMS:

The compromise will basically come from someone simply giving in and letting the vast bulk of the PHYSICAL aspects of the format be taken from one or the other (probably, in this case, BluRay, due to its higher capacity). The side that doesn't "win" on the physical side will get thrown enough of a bone on the data side so that their IP is part of the patent package that companies will need to license to make a player. Remember this is about two things: corporate (and personal) egos, and most of all $$$$$.