Intermittent Issues:
HD and the Format Wars (2002-2005) Part 1

By Ben Gruchow

July 16, 2015

Days of BOP's Future Past.

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The other one was centered around the gaming aspect of the format. Console and PC gaming technology accelerates in complexity as quickly as anything else in the industry we’re covering, and optical HD was going to be a big part of any future gaming plans. From day one, it was a given that Sony was going to link its HD format with the next generation of its PlayStation gaming console. HD-DVD, on the other hand, had Microsoft as one of its early and constant backers, and Microsoft had just jumped into the console gaming market with the XBox several years before.

Sales weren’t a patch on Sony’s PlayStation 2, but they were successful enough to warrant a follow-up console. Blu-ray’s disc structure utilized Java for its multimedia, and Microsoft had its own multimedia framework, known as .Net; it was unwilling to give up its own kin to adopt another framework. For this reason, Microsoft became one of the biggest proponents of HD-DVD during the series of negotiations and meetings, between Sony’s newly-named Blu-ray Disc Association and the DVD Forum, that went on between 2003 and 2005.




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Their offer to Sony was relatively simple: You put everything about Blu-ray on the table; we’ll put everything about HD-DVD on the table; our engineers will assess the entire table, pick out what works best, and discard what doesn’t. This included Blu-ray Disc’s layer structure, and Sony rejected the proposal. The DVD Forum took this as inflexibility on the part of Sony, and both parties basically packed up their toys and went their separate ways. This was in mid- to late 2005, and no further negotiations were attempted. Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD were being prepared for a 2006 launch.


Thus concludes Part 1 of this Intermittent Issues series. Check back for Part 2, where we go into the actual format war, the developments, and the resolution. Thanks for reading!


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