The tech industry got HD-DVD all wrong
There are two very important reasons why the entire tech industry got HD-DVD completely wrong. One, as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow ought to be advocates of, is HD-DVD not having region coding or as much DRM as Blu-ray. The second, which the entire Wall Street Journal editorial board should support is the fact that variety is the spice of life. Oh, no, I meant that competition is the seed for all that is good and wonderful in our laissez-faire economic system.
The tech industry got HD-DVD so wrong because, unlike Blu-ray, HD-DVD had no region coding and had less restrictive DRM. This is important because consumers like you and me are sick of being dictated to about how we use our content. The VCR allowed us more freedom, as did the CD burner. Complicated codecs (Apple’s .m4p) and software restrictions (iPod usage limitations) severely hamper what we can do with the music we paid for.
Amazon’s MP3 store has gone a long way towards rectifying this situation but DRM on video remains as absurdly limiting as ever. iSquint, HandBrake, VLC, and so on exist just to help you untangle your content from their manacles. Why is it so hard?! HD-DVD did not have as complicated a DRM system as Blu-ray and for that reason we should have all been trumpeting it as the next generation product.
We should allow the market to operate on its own free from regulation and allow it to fight monopolistic tendencies. It is controversial to argue for more than one optical format, because the response will be that it complicates matters, forces a higher cost on the consumer by requiring her to buy two players, and complicate the lives of average citizens staring at stacks of competing players at CompUSA.
It may seem illogical to argue that competing formats is good for the consumer, but the opposite is true. When two similar goods square off the result is a bitter fight to the death with equally split market share. Using the example of colas, every time Pepsi lowers the price, Coca-Cola must follow suit. If Pepsi increased the quality of its product, Coca-Cola would have to scramble to match the new standard. In this way, Blu-ray and HD-DVD would have squared off and fought bitterly for our dollars. They would have increased quality, lowered prices, and packed in more features to beat the other for that precious penny.
All that is left is one player in a lucrative market. Yes, in ten years we will all download music and video from iTunes or Amazon or maybe even a resurgent Napster, but today Sony is grinning. It can riddle its product with copy protection, region coding, and restrictive DRM. Geeks/nerds/techies should be disappointed. Sony can also price its players and discs however it wishes, control production numbers to throttle output, and pay its employees whatever it likes. Economists should be disappointed. From whatever angle you approach the issue, I believe you too should be disappointed. Unless you work at Sony.
I think there’s a pretty significant difference between an industry standard and healthy competition. I don’t see how the next-gen format war did anything special to drive companies to improve their products, nor did it help consumers - movie studios were divided on their support for the formats, which meant that until a victor was decided, early adopters would have to choose between Handful-of-Companies A, Handful-of-Companies B, or a more expensive HD-DVD/Blu-ray player combo. Furthermore, now that Blu-ray has been decided upon, *all* parties can work towards building machines to directly compete with each other.
I also have to argue about whether or not the consumer actually cares about getting the technically superior product. You bring up “Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola” as an analogy, but I’d say that simply shows how much consumers don’t care: in the same vein as how many people don’t really take their choose of one over the other into consideration, I’d be willing to bet that most people don’t really care whether or not that, when they are eventually forced to upgrade their machines, its to either Format A or Format B.
At the end of the day, competition for products is good, but HD-DVD and Blu-ray really aren’t products - surprise, surprise, they’re formats.
‘they are eventually forced to upgrade their machines’ My problem is exactly that; it’s uncompetitive, monopolistic, and therefore not in the interest of a consumer. As for format v product, when you place a halo over a product, (thereby labeling it a format) you surrender the forces of innovation to the forces of complacency. I refuse to do that.
But they would have always been forced to upgrade their machines, whether to Sony’s format or Microsoft’s. You can’t stop the march of technology, especially when it’s not harming the consumer at all, really. DVDs are still the main format, and Blu-rays will only begin to take over when more consumers buy them, which will only happen when prices are cheaper. In this way, the market is quite easily in the consumer’s control.
I will concede that, without a dominant format, it might have been easier for a third party to come along and propose an ever better disc format for which we would all be thankful. However, not only was the format war really never a place where that could happen upon the launch of the PS3, but I still do not think that the continuation of the format wars, and the delaying of an industry standard, was actively helpful to consumers, especially those looking to have an early purchase into the “next-gen”.