They were the only CE company not to embrace Blu-ray technology. As chair of the DVD Forum, they decided their patent stake (money) was more important.
They were the only CE company not to embrace Blu-ray technology. As chair of the DVD Forum, they decided their patent stake (money) was more important.
Yep. The zealots will say it was Sony and the BDA. But, Blu-ray was on the market in Japan before Toshiba ever brought AOD/HD DVD to the DVD Forum.
When Sony/Panasonic/Philips raised the possibility of submitting BD as new ROM format, Toshiba made it clear they'd use their influence to push their own agenda.
So, now the zealots then turn around and BLAME the companies that would form the BDA, for not submitting BD for defeat and then agreeing to back Toshiba. Geez.
In short, Toshiba. For a brief look at how history brought us to the present in terms of Blu-ray and HD DVD, I've included a regurgitated post I listed on HighDefDigest and AppleInsider. (So, don't think this is directed toward you or anyone, but simply provides a good summation of how certain things went down.) Ok, here it is...
Okay, history lesson time. As many of you'll notice, there are many companies that are a part of the DVD Forum that are also a part of the BDA. Why? One may ask, is because of certain events that have brought us to the current predicament of having two next generation of formats.
First, is that Blu-ray was ofiicially announced in February of 2002 (with the development of the technology spanning all the way back to 1995)...
Having stated this and providing proof for this fact, the question remains, why are we in this predicament? Well, if there is a good portion of blame to throw too, it is to the Toshiba clan who, when presenting the HD DVD format to the DVD Forum, could NOT get the necessary votes within the DVD Forum to get their format approved. So what happened? Well, the committee, changed the way votes were counted, so that abstained votes were not counted, since the majority of the steering committee were Blu-ray supporters (10 out of 17) and were not present.
If this is not dirty, I don't know what is, but the reality of the fact is that a format war was not upon us until Toshiba and Co. resorted to unethical tacticts to get their format approved by the DVD Forum. Furthermore, even though that HD DVD has the DVD Forum's approval, it is important to note that...
Note that the DVD Forum does not specify standards. It does not design formats, rather it provides support in terms of format compliance verification. Designing formats is under the realm of manufacturers or teams of manufacturers.
So either way, the DVD Forum doesn't mean really much at all, but simply a hyped talking point of HD DVD supporters.
Toshiba basically, they wanted to the next disc format to be red laser and they tried to push it through the DVD Forum without the backing of the rest of the steering committee, but failed. The BDF was then formed, the companies included all of you general household CE names such as Panasonic, Sony, Phillips, Pioneer, Samsung, Hitachi, Sharp, and LG, others included TDK, Memorex, and Datawrite and they decided to abstain from all future DVD Forum steering committee voted pertaining to the next HD optical format.
The BDF announced that they would be pursuing blue laser technology on their discs, and that they would use a different physical structure to DVD, to a) avoid expensive licensing costs, and b) increase capacity. Thus they decided to use a 0.1 numerical aperture, which put the data layer at ~ 0.1mm away from the surface instead of the 0.6mm that DVD uses. At this point BDs were so fragile that they needed caddies (similar to UMD or MiniDisc), but the BDF decided that this was a bad marketing move and could impede mass market adoption. So the BDF gave TDK the task of forming a process by which the shallow data layer could be protected from scratches and dirt, they came up with a two-spin process, and used their proprietary substance which they called Durabis. Durabis is not compulsory on BDs, but the two-spin hardcoat process is, and must be on all discs. Thus the Blu-ray Disc as be know it was formed.
All the while, Toshiba were still trying to go with red laser HD based on DVD-DL and 720p content (the 3x DVD we are now hearing about), but as soon as they heard that the BDF had decided on blue laser tech they changed the AOD (which is what they called it, Advanced optical disc) specification to include 405nm light instead of standard DVD red laser light. This bumped up the capacity to 15GB per layer, and at that point they announced that would call the discs HD DVD and that this was the 'perfect name' as it would capitalise on the strong DVD brand. The BDF disagreed and said it would cause consumer confusion and thus the name Blu-ray was born and the BDF changed their name to the BDA and started accepting new members including 20th Century Fox, Disney Corp, Apple Computer, Dell, HP, and later Warner Brothers and Paramount.
Once the physical structure of the discs were finalised they started to think about the interactivity and actual content. At this point MS entered the fray with their iHD technology which they had developed in-part with Disney. The most powerful members of the BDA were wary of any involvement of MS in their newly formed format, and voted against it and approved Sun Microsystems Java technology instead, this lead to speculation that Disney would switch sides as they had a hand in iHD technology, which would now be used on the rival HD DVD format. Disney as we well know stood their ground and didn't cave to MS pressure. iHD was renamed to HDi. The DVD forum approved iHD/HDi for use on HD DVD and another Microsoft technology VC-1 which they licensed from the SMPTE organisation. The original plan for BD was to have the same spin speed as HD DVD, but studios lobbied and said that increased bandwidth was required to fully take advantage of the increased capacity, so the mandatory speed for BD was put at 1.5x which is about 56Mbps of which 8Mbps is unusable, giving maximum mux bandwidth of 48Mbps, HD DVD decided that they didn't require 1.5x spin as it would slow deployment as they would have to wait for technology to mature until 2x drives were easy to produce. Another plan for the BDA was to include just MPEG2 as their mandatory video codec, but again studios lobbied and so did Microsoft (that's something we can thank MS for), saying that without advanced codecs the format would be gimped, so the BDA caved and put AVC and VC-1 into the mandatory spec.
Now all of the BDA companies were complaining that bringing two formats to the market was stupid and they didn't want to repeat mistakes of the past (Beta vs VHS) so format unification talks started. These initial talks amounted to nothing as neither camp was willing to budge, the main culprits in this were Toshiba as they said they wanted to keep the DVD structure (thus keeping patent royalties flowing for the next ten years or so). The media at this point Demonised the BDA, through no small effort of MS and their band of cronies, saying that the BDA were to blame for chasing infeasible technology (BD-DL was pretty hard to replicate en masse at this point whereas HD DVD-DL was pretty simple). Talks ended with no compromise in sight.
HD DVD was supposed to be brought to market early in 2005, but they failed as the AACS copy protection scheme was nowhere near finished and they didn't have nearly enough disc production capacity, so they delayed it until Holiday '05. Christmas arrived, no HD DVD players in sight, just a prototype shown at CEDIA in September, Toshiba (the principal manufacturer of HD DVD players) announced during CES 2006 that they would bring their players to market for about $800 in April. CES 2006 was big for HD DVD as they showed samples and they were pretty awesome, whereas it was pretty much a non-starter for the BDA. Then came February, Samsung announced that they would have a player ready for August and it would retail for around $1100, not much more that the so called cheaper HD DVD technology. Toshiba had expected BD pricing to be more like $1800 for a player, based on Japanese pricing. Toshiba decided to take a hit and announced that they would now be bringing two models to the market, the HD-A1, and the HD-XA1, the A1 would retail for $499 and the XA1 for $899 (though I am not too sure on the XA1 pricing). April came, and so did HD DVD.
The rest as they say is history, and I guess you know what happened since April.
Sorry for the long post, I may have got some of the dates a bit wrong, but I am very hungover and I can't be bothered to Google everything. I hope I have been at least slightly informative.
4 words sum up what started this and why its lasted this long:
Money
Greed
Toshiba Microsoft
MS had no hand in starting the war, though they do have large role in continuing it now. MS were all for Blu-ray when they though HDi was going to be included in the spec, and they didn't know that Sony were going to use it in the PS3.
All countries
Argentina
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Chile
China
Colombia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Estonia
Denmark
Finland
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Ireland
Israel
India
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
What started the format war?
Linear Mode
