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Blue-ray or HD DVD? The Hard Drive

January 10th, 2008 | by Jose Miguel Cansado |

Blue-ray is winning the battle for the next-gen DVD. Warner has announced that they will release high-definition movies only in Blue-ray format starting July. With Warner announcement, Sony has secured support for Blue-ray from most of the big film studios.

This is a big win for Sony, specially for the push it will generate in sales of PS3, which includes a Blue-ray reader. The cost optimization that Sony has engineered on the new models of PS3, plus Blue-ray, will make PS3 gain ground on the console battle. Since Xbox 360 supports the “losing” Toshiba HD DVD format, there will be a hit on Xbox 360 sales in the short term. Some Microsoft spokesman already mentioned that Microsoft could consider Blue-ray, if it finally becomes the de facto standard.

Nonetheless, with the predictable increase of bandwidth in our broadband connections, and with High Definition being offered by more and more IPTV service providers, the winning format of the next-gen DVD becomes less relevant than in previous standard wars. In the future, we will consume HD movies through video-on-demand or movie download services, as Amazon Unbox, instead of through a disc format. The CEO of Seagate, one of the biggest hard drive manufacturers, states it clearly: “Blu-ray won the battle but lost the war“. If on-line distribution triumphs over physical disc distribution as expected , the hard drives will be the storage for the movies distributed on-line. Not even backups are likely to be made on discs in the future, once we have Blue-ray writers. As network storage gets cheaper and cheaper, and broadband better and better the Net will be the right place to host your backups.

Nonetheless, congratulations to Sony for winning this battle.