Nailing Blu-Ray’s coffin shut
Toshiba Creates Three-Layered Disc (Gizmodo via Slashdot).
Backwards-compatibility! Today’s normal DVD players will play these hybrid discs just fine, and when you put the very same disc into an HD-DVD player, you get the next-gen HD content. You pay once for both next-gen HD content and graceful degradation to ubiquitous players. It’s no longer a binary choice between DVD and HD. The very best part: so few next-gen HD players and discs have shipped yet that this tech has a fighting chance of being in the second wave of products making it out to customers.
It’s not clear yet if next-gen HD will have as sharp an adoption curve as DVDs did. DVD’s advantages over VHS were fairly overwhelming: extra features, physical convenience, vastly better video quality, multichannel audio, multiple audio tracks, optional subtitles in multiple languages. Next-gen HD doesn’t bring much, just a little bit more of everything (resolution, channels, tracks, frames). DVD has a formidable installed base without compelling reason to upgrade, so the transition to next-gen HD may be fairly slow. In a slow transition, the most backwards-compatible format will win.
Blu-Ray’s only possible hope of responding is getting players in front of TV sets and burners into the lion’s share of computers, fast. PS3 is trying on the first count, but it may not be fast enough to get out there. At least its competitors, the 360 and Revolution, don’t come with HD-DVD players. As for computers, a brief survey of the two formats’ wikipedia articles seems to indicate Blu-ray has a slight headstart, though HD-DVD has more supporters in the PC industry.
As an aside, HD-DVD uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and friends for interactive programming and menus, while Blu-Ray uses Java. To me, that says everything that needs to be said about the two formats’ technical merits and likely trajectory of adoption by programmers.