However, the real failure of HD-DVD was, in the end, due to the lack of strong movie studio and manufacturer support. If you don't have enough content, there is less incentive for consumers to be drawn to you. Families with children want access to Disney movies, and HD-DVD didn't have it. Also, when Warner Bros, which started out releasing in both formats, decided to drop its HD-DVD support, that started the beginning of the end of HD-DVD.
It is also hard for a single manufacturer, even the size of Toshiba, to prevail against the combined manufacturing forces of Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Hitachi, and others. The rumors that Chinese companies would saturate the market with inexpensive HD-DVD players never materialized on Toshiba's behalf.
Also, with Sony having finally learned its lesson with the demise of BETA, SACD, and MiniDisc, it was determined not to fail with Blu-ray. Sony's business infrastructure consists of both hardware manufacturing and movie studio ownership (Sony Pictures - which includes Tri-Star and Columbia). This combination of both a strong manufacturing and content base, served to attract other partners to their cause.
Of course, the question needs to be asked: "What, besides the persuasiveness of Sony, attracted the majority of movie studios to gravitate to Blu-ray, rather than HD-DVD?" Three factors that help to answer this question are:
A. More perceived copy-protection capability in the form of BD+: The thing about copy-protection is that it doesn't hamper the real video pirates, evidenced that both the copy-protection systems for HD-DVD and Blu-ray, including BD+ have been successfully hacked, but it causes great inconvenience for average consumers in that some discs become unplayable, or it causes issues with player/HDMI/TV connectivity.
B. Region Coding: Although not as complicated as the current standard DVD region coding system, for fans of worldwide film releases and the tendency for movie studios to enforce different pricing levels, and sometimes different bonus features, for the same movie in different regions, region coding is not the consumer's friend. Check out the details of the Blu-ray Region Code scheme.
C. The Sony Playstation 3 Factor: This move placed Blu-ray capable playback devices in the hands of avid gamers, whether they wanted it or not, which ended up making the PS3 very expensive as a game console, but relatively inexpensive as a Blu-ray disc player.
The result of this strategy is that over a million Blu-ray equipped PS3's were sold in addition to standalone Blu-ray Disc players. Even if only half of of PS3 owners took advantage of Blu-ray playback on their units, the potential customer base for increased Blu-ray disc software sales was there, further attracting movie studio interest. If it wasn't for the Sony PS3, HD-DVD would actually have had a slight edge in players sold over Blu-ray, and a larger potential customer base for disc sales.
Overall, despite some missed opportunities, Toshiba deserves credit for its aggressiveness and determination in bringing HD-DVD to the market. However, after Warner made its Blu-ray only release announcement just prior to CES 2008, Toshiba just didn't have much steam or market resources left to bounce back, and the dominoes (such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Netflix) have been falling rapidly ever since.
Proceed to Page 4: Where Blu-ray Needs to Go From Here - A Final Note For Current HD-DVD Player Owners
