Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"There is growing sentiment in the industry that Blu-Ray, as it was originally intended, is a failure. How can that be? Wasn’t it just a year ago that Blu-Ray, with its greater data capacity, triumphed over the opposing HD-DVD standard? Well promises were made to achieve that victory and now it appears promises may have been broken. Understand that the success or failure of Blu-Ray has little to do with games and everything to do with movies. Two historical events informed the battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. First was the epic and costly 1980‘s competition between the BetaMax and VHS tape cassette standards. Second was the triumphant succession of DVD over VHS, when we all replaced our tape libraries with disks, gladly paying anew for what we already owned, buying every Hollywood exec a new Mercedes in the process."

Cringley argues that the reason Activision is putting pressure on Sony has more to do with a failure of Blu-ray than game sales. Although I was hoping HD-DVD would win, I think the perceived failure of Blu-ray is really a matter of falsely defining the definition of success. Expecting Blu-ray to replicate the success of DVD was not reasonable. Neither HD format offered the kind of upgrade that DVD offered over VHS. Plus, people have lots of DVD players, so unless they want to restrict their viewing to just one TV, they've got to replace all their players, which is not exactly cheap. One of the great features of HD-DVD was the combo disk, which eliminated this problem. Eventually, Blu-ray players will achieve penetration through a slow war of attrition as old DVD players get replace and Blu-ray players reach a price that DVD players will no longer be produced.

OK, I confess, as much as I hated having to do it, I have gone back and purchased multiple copies of the same content in different formats. Normally, I'm against this as a matter of principle since I figure I should not have to pay twice for the same content. Of course, the move to HD content changes that equation for me since just like the move from VHS to DVD, whether you like it or not, you are getting a higher quality level, which has value. For VHS, over time, I've replaced everything in my collection with DVD. For DVD, I'm being more selective since a) for a lot of content the difference from DVD to Blu-ray is negligible or unimportant and b) Blu-ray players are backwards compatible so I can still use my DVDs. But, there are always certain titles that I'll want the latest and greatest versions of.

Star Wars is an obvious example for me. I've bought it 4 times already and I'll be buying it a 5th when it eventually comes out on Blu-ray. Lord of the Rings is another example, I bought the regular and extended versions on DVD, but I'll only be picking up the extended versions on Blu-ray since I find the extended version massively superior to the theatrical release. Also, I'm a big Firefly fan, so I bought Serenity on DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray. Interestingly, I don't plan on buying the Firefly series on Blu-ray. I rented it and found that due to the grainy style of the series, it did not benefit much from the Blu-ray transfer. So, what are your guilty pleasures that have caused you to double dip for the same content?