Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD - the end of another format war

Here at the Culturepin I provide a form of virtual safari through the bleeding edge landscape of the world and contemporary society. Suffice to say it is a treacherous terrain filled with uncertainty and conflict that requires a certain mad bravery to traverse. Even more treacherous is attempting to predict what will unfold around the next bend or come to pass just over the horizon.

So I avoid being a soothsayer, but rather, an echo of what is going down on the frontier. Which brings me to today's subject - the latest format war in the VHS vs. Beta legacy, namely: Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD.

Here's a very condensed version of what is one of the dirtiest and most agitated format wars in history:

Blu-Ray, a format developed by leading company NP Infotech and co-developed by Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung, and Sony (a collective that named itself the Blu-ray Disc Association as recently as 2004 - all this to say Blu-Ray does NOT=Sony per se), aspired to be the new high-definition playback and storage format for laser-based media.

On the other side of the proverbial laser-based media universe, was Toshiba with HD-DVD.

The shakedown was that Microsoft released an HD-DVD player for the Xbox360 and Sony went with Blu-Ray for its PS3 gaming platform.

Millions of emotionally charged discussion board posts later, Wal-Mart, that proverbial lynch pin of all things mass-marketable, announced it was phasing out HD-DVD and going exclusively with Blu-Ray. Just two nights ago - Valentine's Day, 2008 I said that if Wal-Mart goes with Blu-Ray it's all over.

February 15th, 2008, Engadget, a popular technology blog, thrust itself onto the global stage by boldly announcing the end of HD-DVD based on Wal-Mart's announcement that it was going with Blu-Ray and citing reports from Reuters that Toshiba planned to stop production at its HD-DVD factories and thus the meme percolated throughout the format battleground.

None of this is absolute - however, for those who have been watching from the sidelines, wondering when they can start ordering their high-definition entertainment content from Amazon - you now know which way to hedge your bets.

Two things to ponder:

1) When a format wins, it is not necessarily because it is the superior format
2) When VHS killed Beta, there was no internet community

In the meantime, I am going to enjoy the copious bonus features on my Children of Men HD-DVD from my Xbox360 and wait for the prices of the remaining HD-DVD catalog to plummet so I can get another 350 or so titles that were released in the US for pocket change.

Disclaimer: I am not an advocate of either company or format - I have a Sony Bravia screen and I use Sony Vegas software, while I am inputting this entry on my Toshiba m300 Satellite laptop.

Dear Brother

With all due respect to those who have died in the spirit of serving some higher moral...

It weighs on my heart that despite my strongest efforts I was unable to get through to you, though it is not surprising and unfair to my own efforts when contrasted with the coercive mechanisms devised by the military to persuade you.

I have buried many friends for as many reasons - suicide, illness, overdoses - but yours will be the hardest to accept, because you trained for your own death. And you trained to take the lives of others. The saddest part is that you employed your greatest assets - tenacity, loyalty, dedication, intelligence to prepare for this tour through darkness, whereas you could have just as readily exercised these virtues towards the light.

What are you fighting for? What is it that you are being indoctrinated with that makes you believe what you are doing is for a greater good? Your responsibility is to yourself and you have defied that. With this decision you have made, you have also forgotten about those who love you. You counter that you are doing this to protect us; this only underlines the naivety upon which you have based your decision. Whatever sense of martyrdom you are carrying around in your heart is simply mislabeled hubris and selfishness - the ripple effect that harm coming to you through your experience will create is a function of your decision. When a person takes their own life they fail to respect what they leave behind. It is an utterly selfish act. I am not sure if you were playing a bluff - but they army is gonna call you out bud. They want a return on their investment.

Recognize that if you had filled your hours with other data then you would have arrived somewhere else. The sense of inevitability you now feel and face, is a function of your own creative power. But now you have surrendered that ability to choose over to someone else and there is a price you will pay for defaulting on your own free will. It is like walking to the front steps of prison and asking them to lock you inside for no reason other than having convinced yourself that you are not worthy of participating in the abundance of life. You gave up that bounty.

I am certain that you have been schooled to think that what you have been trained to do is to think on your feet, to take initiative, to steer your own course, to live the impossible dream, to explore the world, to discover your fullest potential. But you have been conned and that is what hurts me most. That I believed you knew better.

You were the kid who got a job so you could pay for your own singing lessons. Who aspired to set a Guinness record for tap dancing the longest distance - from the suburbs to downtown, who wrote incredible stories of marvelous lands, who aspired to be a nuclear physicist and gemologist.

But this is not fantasyland now, brother. Your mortality and your fragility are both very, very real. Whatever insecurities were preyed upon when that recruiting scout approached you on the bus home from school that day - memories of being teased at school, of being different, of being called weak - they are what has delivered you to this momentous decision you have made, and now it is your path - one that you accepted, that you fed with your own powers of manifestation. There is no destiny in it - only the legacy of choices you made. But you have relinquished that power now. Now you are someone else's property.

There is a time and place to fight for what you believe in. But you have signed up for someone else's war. It wasn't a threat to your country. It wasn't a threat to your family. You actively sought this fight out and decided to jump in for a piece of the action. To "prove" yourself.

There are many ways to defend freedom. Unfortunately a bigger machine than you are capable of perceiving co-opted the word and transformed its utility, just as it has your understanding of what other options and ultimately rewarding and significantly more self-empowering methods are available. I will, with the same tenacity and determination continue to support freedom, peace, love, understanding, wisdom and I imagine to greater effect.

The only thing we have is to choose how we think about things and from that we manifest the life we will live. I respect that, and I respect that you had the power to choose for yourself. We make our own beds, we dig our own trenches.

I miss you already.

May God bless your path.