Not a definitive win for Blu Ray

Blu-Ray seems to have seen off its immediate rival with Toshiba quitting the field, but it would be premature for Sony to declare victory. Technology wise there was really not much to split the two formats on a meaningful trechnical basis and in the end the fight came down to which movie studios each could get online. The conjecture that the win went to the player with the biggest pockets is probably correct but ultimately immaterial. Sony still needs to worry because the fight has not yet hit the field that matters.

That field is the PC. While there has been a small uptake of next gen DVD players for the high end video crowd, the players are nowhere near mainstream yet. Even then the market for playing movies is small compared to the market for PC data discs. And it is once the next gen formats start hitting the PC that the battle will really begin. This part is not likely to happen this year, the price of the units will need to come down significantly before the PC makers start offering next gen players in their systems, and until that happens software makers won't take the effort to release their software in that format.

The other factor that will determine uptake is having recordable versions of the discs. A lot of the use of the media will be in the ability to use it as a backup and data transfer method. This is where the Blu Ray story can fall down (and HD-DVD would have as well). At the moment breaking the encoding on these discs is possible but not easy, the encryption methods will not be as easy to keep under wraps though once recordable versions of these mediums become common in PC's. The security that is in the format also reduces the usefulness as a data storage medium.

The other problem is that Blu-Ray is bigger than DVD, but not that big. The average hard disk size has grown much faster than the optical medium. With 500GB and 1TB drives common now, will Blu-Ray offer a compelling backup story to drive adoption, particularly with potential technical challenges, like the potential of a new media disk intentionally bricking your drive rendering your backups useless.

With the PC market on the horizon there are a couple of competing technologies waiting in the wings that could come to the fore. The Chinese have been content to play in China only with the CH-DVD, but this situation could change once the PC market comes in play (Lenovo anyone?). There is another technology called TerraDisk which is betaware at the moment but if it works will provide 1TB of data on a CD/DVD sized disc.

I agree with the recent Gizmodo story, think carefully about what you need it for before you decide a winner has been determined and go out and buy that Blu-Ray player.