HD DVD vs. Blu-ray – Who will be the next Betamax?

Posted by Joe on January 9th, 2008

Two different high definition DVD formats are competing to bring HD quality DVD entertainment to your home. because we have been reviewing online dvd rental services for some time, we decided to take a look at each of the competing technologies, HD DVD and Blu-ray, in an attempt to bring some clarity to our readers.

High definition televisions, or HD TVs, began to gain prominence in the early part of this decade thanks to a decrease in purchase price of HD TV sets along with a significant increase in the availability of high definition programming offered by major televison networks and cable providers. However, it quickly became apparent that standard DVDs, even in high end DVD players, couldn't take advantage of the many benefits that HD TVs offered viewers. Due to some squabbles related to technological specifics, two standards emerged to solve this problem.

From our perspective, The Sony backed Blu-ray and Toshiba backed HD DVD formats offer consumers nearly identical benefits including major larger storage capacity, drastically improved HD picture quality and the potential for more interactive elements (using a broadband Internet connection) than a standard DVD.

The real differentiation comes when you start to review the availability of movie titles for the two competing high def DVD technologies. Blu-ray has agreements with six major movie studios including Sony Pictures, Buena Vista, Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, Paramount and, most recently, Warner Bros. HD DVD, on the other hand, has only one major movie studio, Universal, producing DVD content for its players.

Warner Bros had previously published high def DVDs for both HD DVD and Blu-ray, but made the move exclusively to Blu-ray as a reaction to purchase trends they had seen developing wordlwide. Said Kevin Tsujihara, the president of Warner Bros Home Entertainment in America:

We were the only studio publishing both formats, but the consumers that were buying were gravitating towards Blu-ray – particularly in the UK and Japan.

Our two highest rated online movie rental services, Blockbuster and NetFlix, offer high definition DVD movies in both formats, but the number of Blu-ray movie titles is much larger given the sheer number of studios that are releasing movies exclusively on that format.

Our opinion is that Blu-ray will inevitably own the market for high definition DVD and become the defacto standard. So, if you absolutely had to purchase a high def DVD player today , Blu-ray would definitely be the way to go.

That being said, we suggest that consumers wait before jumping into high definition DVD for the meantime. Blu-ray players are still relatively expensive at about $399 and movies cost about $40 a piece. These price will inevitably drop over the coming year which will make the upgrade from standard DVD even more attractive to most consumers.

In the meantime, we strongly suggest that all our readers that frequently watch DVDs at home sign up for an online dvd rental service which will save time and money. We have reviewed several online dvd rental services and you can read our reviews and comparisons in our from online DVD rental guide.