Legal Research

DVD Wars Over

OK - we know CD-ROM won out over vinyl, cassette tapes and 8-Tracks.

78 lost to 33 1/3 (and its cousin 45) whih lost to digital. There are still some afficianados who llove earlier formats but it is a small and shrinking niche market.

Of course, CD is gradually losing the format battle to MP3 downloads.

We know that film (when I was a kid we borrowed 8 mm and 16 mm films from my local public library) lost out to videotape and Beta formats lost out to VHS. Videotape lost out to DVD. (although there will always be small markets for alternative formats).

Picture camera film still exists now only mostly for the professional and hobbyist market but digital cameras and home printers do a pretty good job for the mass consumer. Polaroid has announced that instant film will stop being produced at all over the next couple of months..

Now comes news that the traditional DVD format battle that was between the HD DVD format for high-definition video and the competing Blu-Ray format has been won by Blu-Ray. Toshiba will stop production of HD-DVD machines and big retail Wal-Mart will only stock Blu-Ray.

Yep. Again our library world is thrown into having multiple formats to support and stock in old formats for a shrinking market.

While it was interesting that CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc. all won their respective battles, they haven't won the war. Streaming media is coming on strong and it's time to experiment with streaming video, MP3 collections, and high definition YouTube style videos as recently announced by DailyMotion. YouTube is having to play catch-up.

Life gets interesting. This game isn't for the weak willed or risk averse.

And yes, your old collections will still work as long as you can find player. I know of some school boards that have such a huge investment in Beta that they buy old players on eBay. If you have a huge collection in old formats (like me) buy one on sale (I found a joint DVD / VHS player for under $50.00)

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on February 18, 2008 (boomark / email).