Blu-Ray

At long last the brutal war is over. I speak, of the Format War. The battle between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD waged on for many years and at times it seemed that HD DVD had won. Yet finally Blu-ray Disc has claimed victory and taken the title of the future media recording device.

The year was 2000, the date October 5th. Japan was holding its annual Ceatec Show near Tokyo where two companies, Sony and Pioneer, were planning to unveil the latest and greatest in technology, DVR Blue (Pettit, David.) DVR Blue was the first generation of the Blu-ray Disc. It wasn’t, however, until 2002 that Sony managed to organize nine of the world’s largest electronics companies to agree to support Blu-ray (Pettit, David.) In light of the newly formed group of Blu-ray supporters, Toshiba and NEC proposed to the DVD Forum their next generation of Optical Disc, HD DVD (Pettit, David,) and thus began the Format War. The First Prototypes of the Blu-ray Disc recorders and HD DVD recorders were presented at the 2002 Ceatec Exhibition. At the time it wasn’t called HD DVD yet, it was called Advanced Optical Disc (Pettit, David.) After the exhibition, things started to heat up for the two formats. By only April 10th, 2003 Sony launched the first retail Blu-ray recorder on the market; it only cost a mere $3,815 (Pettit, David.) It’s not until January, 7th, 2004 that Toshiba came out with a successful prototype of the HD DVD player (Pettit, David.) By this time key electronic companies such as Mitsubishi Electric, Hewlett Packard and Dell had already decided to support Blu-ray Disc (Pettit, David.) The long awaited for Playstation 3 had many supporters from the onset, but when Sony announced that the PS3 would have a Blu-ray drive people went crazy (Pettit, David.) This defining moment for Sony is what tipped the balance of the war and started the rise of Blu-ray to the top. But, oh wait, November 29, 2004, 4 huge companies decided to do something brash. Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO and New Line Cinema all decided that they would go against the flow of the current and support HD DVD (Pettit, David.) Then Paramount Home Entertainment, Hewlett Packard and LG Electronics decided to play the neutral ticket, rather than pick a side, and create players that supported both Blu-Ray Disc and HD DVD (Pettit, David.) Within a few short months Blu-ray began to slide down the totem pole and HD DVD began to climb.