The latest format wars between HD-DVD and Blu-ray have just wrapped up, with Blu-ray emerging as the winner. The tragedy is that the new format became obsolete long before the war ever started.
As digital media (music, movies, TV) all become available online through iTunes and other online download services, the popularity of digital media is slowly dying out. Whereas the sale of digital media has peaked, services that offer the same content online have been growing by leaps and bounds.
This is easily understood by the proliferation of digital storage, and the integration of the internet, computer and television. With recent advents in the field of hard drives, large amounts of storage capacity are as affordable as ever. Terabytes of storage (enough for hundreds of movies and millions of songs) can now be purchased for a few hundred dollars. When you combine that with near complete proliferation of broadband internet, and media center devices (like the Apple TV), which allow you to interface your computer with your television, it’s easy to understand why digital media has become so popular. This all comes with the added benefit of not having to worry about outdated formats, or scratched/broken physical media.
The only thing really standing in the way of online and digital media is the service providers. Most of the infrastructure that allows us to access the internet is becoming dangerously obsolete. There just isn’t enough bandwidth on old telephone and cable lines in order to allow customers to stream HD content to their heart’s content. The act of replacing or renewing this infrastructure is a costly one — which explains why most of the companies seem to be going the route of restricting usage and cracking down on bandwidth-intensive activities. The change to newer transmission media will be slow, and meanwhile companies like Bell have already started to see how much extra bandwidth they can squeeze out of their aging telephone infrastructure.
The coming wave of internet-born digital content is inevitable, but fear not! Companies will still find ways to engage in future “format wars” by fighting over codecs and copy protection formats.
