| By :
Paul Wise
Format wars have been around about as long as there has been hardware and software. And even with almost two decades in the marketplace, DVDs remain an occasional source of confusion for the typical consumer of home electronics. It would appear, however, that the DVD format wars have now been relegated to the past with HD-DVD's recent abdication of the market to Blue-Ray Disc. This fifth in a series of articles examining many matters DVD will continue the survey of HD-DVD begun with the last article. The now defunct HD-DVD Promotion Group had begun as a somewhat rebellious outgrowth of the earlier DVD Forum. The DVD Forum was an alliance of industry titans dedicated to the promotion of and advocacy for the DVD format. When the march of technological progress saw the growth of cliques around various competing standards or formats, a split ensued where member companies coalesced around new organizations dedicated to a specific format. The HD-DVD Promotion Group was one such result of that schism, in reaction to the earlier Blue-Ray Disc Association. Blue-Ray Disc had been developed by Sony while continuing research into the laser technology behind the DVD. While virtually identical to a standard DVD today, at the time of their introduction Blue-Ray Discs needed to be housed in an expensive caddy, and they also required special players that would accept them. The DVD Forum eventually decided on a proposal endorsed by Warner Brothers and several other motion picture studios called DVD-9. But cliques managed to form around the various formats anyway, with Toshiba and NEC themselves promoting one of their own called Advanced Optical Disc, which is what came to be adopted by the DVD Forum as HD-DVD. Attempts were made to avoid the kind of costly format war that Sony had engaged in with Panasonic during the late '70s and early '80s over Betamax versus VHS. Unfortunately, the Blue-Ray Disc Association and the DVD Forum's negotiations at a compromise were not successful. Aside from the aforementioned matter of physical incompatibility, an additional stumbling block had been each side's insistence on using different software platforms for interactivity, with the Blue-Ray Disc Association favoring the one based on Sun Microsystems' Java language while HD-DVD advocates wanted Microsoft's iHD (later renamed "HDi"). As neither side was able to compromise enough and each side was comprised of important industry leaders, the stage for a costly format war was set.
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