Home Media Magazine - February 24, 2008 - (Page S14) FROM THE BLOGSOPHERE: The Inevitability By Bill Hunt o it’s over. After two difficult years, many hundreds of millions of dollars, plenty of consumer confusion and disc enthusiast bad blood, and enough spin and posturing to make anyone dizzy, Blu-ray Disc is finally poised to take its place as The Next Big Thing in home entertainment. It’s been a long road getting to a Bluray victory, but this outcome should really come as a surprise to no one. The signs were there from the very start, way S back in mid-2005, before these formats even launched. All you really had to do was look at the details of these two formats on paper: Blu-ray offered greater data storage space and greater signal bandwidth than HD DVD. Its interactive component, BD-Java, was an actual program language, meaning that it would potentially be far more robust in the long term than HD DVD’s HDi, which is basically a simple browser extension. And even back then, Blu-ray was supported by a majority of the Hollywood studios, including The Walt Disney Co., which helped develop HDi with Microsoft but then veered toward Blu-ray anyway. Much of the computer industry, outside of Microsoft, favored Blu-ray over HD DVD. Sony was planning to build Blu-ray into every PlayStation 3, giving the format a potentially huge consumer base and a natural hardware edge. Beyond that, nearly every major consumer electronics manufacturer was planning to support Blu-ray Disc, while Toshiba was the sole major hardware backer of HD DVD. 14 IT’S BLU February 2008
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