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‘The Video war’ -dubbed as one of the most exhaustive battles ever fought in the tech world, is far from over. True, HD DVD has called it quits and Blu Ray is declared a winner. But, can Blu Ray survive the high stakes set in course of the war? Not to mention, also compete with the modifications being made in the DVD sector?

If we go over the details, for the nth time, we see that neither of the two had a significant lead over the other. Apart from the 40 percent less storage capacity of the HD DVD, many factors might have helped it change course of the battle. For starters, HD DVD had lower transition and manufacturing costs. Plus, its technical benefits were expected to reduce its marketing time. But its inability to build enough early sales to compete with Blu Ray’s later sales, proved to be costly. No wonder even the subsequent tug of war of who-would-render-maximum-subsidies had to be given to the Blu Ray. Some say that vendors were heartily sick of replacing formats in their shelves and randomly stuck to the one that offered more content. This might be true, for both were trying to replace DVD and the current rate at which a new technology tries to replace an obsolete one is such that there is hardly enough time for the newer one to showcase its shiny features before a third more advanced technology takes charge.

Probably this was the reason why Sony and Panasonic had joined hands and decided to launch one format in 2005. Alas their efforts failed, paving way for the 3 year old video war. Ironically, the only benefactor of this costly affair was DVD! With the technological improvements made in DVD players, the good old DVDs, which people were already reluctant to discard, were back to where they belonged.

Top video equipment makers like Faroudja came up with a technology called ‘up-sampling’, which interpolates the picture elements in a DVD’s 480-line image to give the impression of 720 or even 1,080 lines. Up-sampling not only added hundreds of dollars to a DVD player, but was thrown in for free. So no one even gave a second glance to the costly Blu Ray and went in and up-sampled their rusty DVDs. Though even up-sampling could not create the visual details that were not on the DVD. But it could surely fill the gaps between the video lines with guesses of ‘what might have been there’ and this was more than enough. For the distance a majority of the public maintains, while watching TV, is such that details like this are hardly noticeable.

So, the newly crowned Blu Ray has little chance of retaining its tag of ‘a popular format’. Isnt it a shame, after the millions of dollars both HD DVD & Blu Ray squandered� just to gain an upper hand. Mind you, the money was not even spent on technological improvement, but on bribes to win over retailers and movie studios. It is purported that Panasonic paid $150 million dollars to force DreamWorks and Paramount to sign an 18-month deal with them! It would have been so much better, if the Blu-ray Association would have concentrated on countering services such as Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Unbox, and other advances that are threatening to make physical digital formats irrelevant.

But there is one consolation for Blu Ray and that is: the next generation of super computers will do away with even these up-sampled DVDs. So then, Blu Ray will enjoy supremacy comparable to today’s golden age of DVDs. Meanwhile, beware of Streaming video, which is waiting round the corner to take over optical discs!