Klotera said:
I just don't get why it would have been the "right" thing for HD-DVD to throw in the towel and not Blu-Ray. Easy to say now when Blu-Ray is outselling. Could've said the opposite when HD-DVD was leading.
And, HD-DVD was the format voted on by the DVD Forum. It was Sony who chose to go with their own thing. Unfortunate, as the point of that body was to standardize DVD. Arguably - Sony should have placed their format in that forum for a fair vote with HD-DVD and both sides should have gone with whatever was chosen. That would've been the right thing to do to prevent this format war.
The DVD Forum exists for one thing - to standardize around the disc format called "DVD".
The DVD Forum is not some international standards organization with an agenda to standardize all optical video disc formats, present and future.
Blu-ray would never have been adopted by the DVD Forum because of the power that Toshiba wields there, given that the DVD format is essentially theirs. Because of that, all the companies working on Blu-ray split off and formed their own alliance of companies to standardize their technology.
By the time HD DVD came into being, the vast majority of the consumer electronics companies were supporting Blu-ray. We were in this situation before DVD came out, there were two optical disc standards competing, one Toshiba's, and the other Sony and Philips. A compromise was reached where Toshiba's format was essentially the one adopted, with some changes to accomodate Sony and Philips.
Similar compromise meetings happened before either next-gen disc format happened but this time, MS and Toshiba decided to go their own way. Probably because MS has more to lose with BD in the PS3 and Java as the interactivity layer for BD...even though the BDA adopted VC-1 to try to get MS into their camp.
Don't believe me? Ask yourself why the essentially the only consumer electronics company making HD DVD drives is Toshiba...there are a lot more options if you wanted to pick up a Blu-ray player.
