Sony Not Always the Villain in Format Wars

TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp <6758.T> won the home movie DVD format war, but the consumer-electronics giant faces an even tougher battle persuading shoppers to buy Blu-ray discs in an industry which is looking to the download era.

Sony announced that its PlayStation 3 game console would be equipped with a Blu-ray player more than two years ahead of the actual console launch in a bid to win support for the format from hardware as well as software providers.

And so this was not a consumer rebellion or a consumer decision as to who won this war. This was really decided by the two ends of the distribution chain, the people that make the content -- that is, the Hollywood studios who were wooed heavily by Sony and Toshiba, and in the end more successfully by Sony -- and the distributors, the stores, like Wal-Mart and Target and services like Netflix, which were also heavily wooed, and they eventually came down on the side of Blu-ray.

Last week, Netflix said it would stop carrying HD DVD, and on Friday, Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, announced it would only sell Blu-ray. It's a big victory for Sony, which lost the format war that pitted Betamax against VHS back ...

Sony's Blu-Ray has finally won the battle of the high-definition DVD formats with Toshiba announcing it is to axe its rival HD DVD technology. By Jemima Kiss

HD-DVD standard war. We find that the higher the similarity of the members in the coalition, the greater the probability of standard coalition success. Furthermore, relatedness leads to a greater probability of joining both competing coalitions, ...

Both had technological advantages – Betamax had better picture quality but only one hour of record time, while VHS had two hour record time. Sony hurt its potential user base by requiring licensing fees from other companies who wanted to produce Betamax players.

Eventually, the DVD Forum settled on the Toshiba and NEC HD DVD model over the Blu-ray model.[13] Shortly thereafter, in 2004, the US Department of Justice launched a preliminary inquiry to investigate claims that the Blu-ray Disc Founders, a group consisting of electronics vendors such as Sony and Philips, had attempted to impede progress of the DVD Forum and development of the HD DVD.[14] The next two years saw negotiations and compromises between the two sides to unify the DVD standard and settle on a single format, but in the end, those negotiations fell apart.[15]

Even though the different companies involved all wanted the same thing, they disagreed on what exactly the standard HD format should be. Sony pioneered the Blu-ray format, and with support from companies like Philips, Apple, Dell, and Panasonic, ...