Campaign 2008

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posted Oct. 9, 2008
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MySpace Music lets you listen to pretty much every song ever recorded, and it still sucks.
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posted Oct. 2, 2008
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Microsoft's $300 million campaign to prove Windows isn't lame.
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posted Sept. 29, 2008
The Cell Phone Wars
Apple's iPhone is closed. Google's G1 is open. Which is better?
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posted Sept. 25, 2008
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technology: The future and what to do about it.

I'm the Idiot Who Bought an HD-DVD PlayerA casualty of the format war tells all.

By Josh Levin
Posted Thursday, Feb. 28, 2008, at 5:18 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

The good times didn't last. On the eve of January's Consumer Electronics Show, Warner Bros., which has the largest library of any home-video retailer, signed an exclusive pact with Blu-ray. With disc sales declining, Warner's president said, the company needed to "erase consumer and retailer confusion over dueling DVD formats." Warner's defection put five of the seven major Hollywood studios on Team Blu-ray. Just like that, nobody seemed to care that HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies looked and sounded pretty much the same or that Toshiba's players were way cheaper than their Sony counterparts. No, this war ended in the most annoying way possible—with a bunch of mega-corporations telling gadget buyers they didn't care which format was better. They just wanted it to be over.

At this point, Toshiba turned to a strategy that industry experts call "denial." After admitting he was "disappointed" with the Warner Bros. announcement, a Toshiba exec added, "Sales of HD-DVD were very good last year." This was a bit like the scene in The Naked Gun where Lt. Frank Drebin stands before an exploding fireworks factory and shouts, "Nothing to see here!" In the succeeding weeks, every entity that's capable of writing up a press release—Netflix, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, the nomadic tribesmen of Outer Mongolia—announced it was going Blu.

As these HD-DVD disavowals hit the Web, I got sad ("This blows"), then mad. ("This blows!") All of these companies had been too lily-livered to pick between HD-DVD and Blu-ray when it could've made a difference; instead of having the guts to make up their own minds, they let Warner Bros. tell them what to do. Even worse, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and BusinessWeek reported that Sony, perhaps having learned its lesson from the Betamax debacle, paid Warner Bros. between $400 million and $500 million to go with Blu-ray. Sony hadn't won because it offered the HD-buying public any other tangible advantage. It took down Toshiba because it knew whom to pay off.

In three short months, I was screwed by every cog in the gadget-industrial complex. The tech blogs convinced me that the format war would drag on for years. Sony pulled sketchy backroom deals behind my back. Netflix cut off my HD disc rentals. Even Toshiba did me dirty. Remember those seven free discs? Two of them (The Bourne Identity and 300) came with the player, but I had to mail in a UPC code to collect the other five. Perhaps the cereal-boxlike nature of this giveaway should've tipped me off that HD-DVD was the Frank Stallone of high-definition disc technology. Or maybe the pathetic list of available titles—The Hulk, Aeon Flux, Darkman—should've alerted me to Blu-ray's back-catalog advantage. Anyway, the relevant point here is that I still haven't received any of these terrible movies. You can keep them, Toshiba. I'm sure there's someone somewhere who collects unplayable copies of Black Rain.

While nobody did me any favors along the way, I ultimately screwed myself. It was dumb to assume that HD-DVD's cheapness would give it an advantage in the marketplace. Toshiba's price-cutting sucked in a few idiots like me with HDTVs and (some) money to burn. Still, HD discs are such a niche product that undercutting Sony on price didn't come close to making HD-DVD a mass-market product. Take comfort, landfill managers: The U.S. supply of stand-alone HD-DVD players is a measly 600,000, a microscopic total compared with the number of standard DVD players.

If there's any consolation for us HD-DVD-buying losers, it's that disc-shaped physical media won't be around much longer. Once high-definition digital downloads, like those available through Apple TV, hit the mainstream, Blu-ray will be as dead as HD-DVD. Take that, Sony! In the meantime, I'll console myself by watching hour upon hour of Planet Earth. And no, I'm not going to buy a Blu-ray player. Those things are too damn expensive.