Warm Machine said:
I'm a little sad that the format that got 99% of things right from the get go lost to the one that bungled up almost everything that could be bungled. Still, a single format future is far greater than that anyway as it allows the world to have been given a standard. Now everything can go forward without questions and all this crap will have been forgotten in about 9 months.
Never have I seen two competitors been so blood thirsty to win ever. This war was straight up mean. I wonder if someone will get the inside story of how the war went down and write a book about it.
Wow. That's some first-class revisionist history right there.
Let's see, "the format that got 99% of things right":
-Didn't secure the exclusive support of any of the other, major "name brand" CE manufacturers, and was basically riding on the back of one manufacturer--Toshiba.
-Never had an advantage in studio support.
-Had most of it's major, much-ballyhooed, pre-launch "advantages" over the rival format (launching a year earlier than rival, 1/2 the price, greater name recognition,) either squandered by ineptitude or just plain never materializing in reality.
-Had an absolutely disastrous launch. Delayed multiple times, the format eventually did launch, not a year earlier than Blu-ray as expected, but only by approx two months, with barely any software to speak of at launch, and with just two models to choose from, neither of which was capable of 1080p, with only a paltry total of 10-12,000 units in stores.
-When 1080p players finally did come out, they were priced very similarly to the rival 1080p players offered by Blu-ray, so little impact over the supposed "price advantage" was felt.
-The HD DVD/DVD Combo disc made HD DVD discs more expensive than Blu-ray discs of the same movies, largely negating any consumer-perceived price advantage the format had in media.
-Never had even one week of a head-to-head sales victory over Blu-ray after the PS3 launch.
-Ceded Japan by totally failing to capture the crucial recorder market in Japan due to a dearth of both recording hardware and media compared to the rival format.
...
The format you say "bungled up almost everything that could be bungled":
-Always had greater manufacturer support from popular, trusted brands. Especially the Japanese giant Matsushita (Panasonic,) the forward-looking, value-leading Korean juggernaught, Samsung, and the videophile favorite, Pioneer Elite.
-Always had greater studio support. Locked up absolutely crucial studios like Disney and Fox and gave them a place at the table. Disney became one of the greatest assets, with not only releases, but with marketing the format.
-Until the ridiculous fire sale pricing by Toshiba over the holidays, kept standalone player prices low enough that, in a feature-to-feature comparison, were priced either the same (see the first 1080p players on both sides) or were almost always always within $150-200 of the competition, not "twice the price" as HD DVD tryed to claim.
-Quickly moved to recognize and correct shortcomings in the quality of some early title releases, patching the hole before HD DVD could fully exploit it.
-Kept movie prices right in the same price range as the rival format, or even cheaper, despite supposedly being so much more expensive to produce.
-Put Blu-ray in the PS3, making it more mainstream than HD DVD could have ever hoped to be, even with the HD DVD add-on for the 360.
-Recognized early-on the importance of recordables in the Japanese market, and quickly captured +90% of the high-def share of that market.
-Had much better marketing than the rival, and kept it up.
-Led in movie sales every single week after the PS3 released.
Warm Machine said:
And so would BR fanboys had the reverse happened. It is always interesting and fun to think of it especially because this one hinged on a single event.
Yeah, except that event wasn't Warner's switch, like you think. The "one single event" that doomed HD DVD was the day Toshiba walked out of the "one-format" negotiations with Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung, and Sony, and decided that they could basically go it alone, and beat them all.
Basically, this war never should have started in the first place.