Home Cinema Choice ran a retrospective on the birth of Blu-ray and it reminded me how much of the standard story is wrong. The usual telling is that Warner switched sides and HD DVD folded. True, but it's the ending, not the reason.
The context the piece sets up matters. By 2000 DVD was already one of consumer electronics' great success stories, two years from UK launch and it had pushed home cinema properly mainstream in a way LaserDisc never managed, because it was durable, compact and you didn't have to flip it. That success is exactly why the successor fight was so ugly. Everyone could see how big the prize was.
And then Sony put a Blu-ray drive in a games console and shipped it into millions of living rooms at a price no standalone player could touch, subsidised by hardware they were losing money on anyway. Standalone Blu-ray decks at the time were premium-priced and the early ones had the profile mess to go with them. The PS3 was the cheapest player you could buy, it firmware-updated its way through the profile changes for free, and it meant there was a huge installed base of Blu-ray-capable homes before the studios made their call. Warner did the maths on an installed base that already existed.
The part that ages badly: nobody has repeated that trick. The Xbox Series S has no drive, the PS5 makes it an add-on, and 4K Blu-ray never got its trojan horse. Does anyone think physical media would be in better shape now if the PS5 had shipped with a disc slot as standard?
The context the piece sets up matters. By 2000 DVD was already one of consumer electronics' great success stories, two years from UK launch and it had pushed home cinema properly mainstream in a way LaserDisc never managed, because it was durable, compact and you didn't have to flip it. That success is exactly why the successor fight was so ugly. Everyone could see how big the prize was.
And then Sony put a Blu-ray drive in a games console and shipped it into millions of living rooms at a price no standalone player could touch, subsidised by hardware they were losing money on anyway. Standalone Blu-ray decks at the time were premium-priced and the early ones had the profile mess to go with them. The PS3 was the cheapest player you could buy, it firmware-updated its way through the profile changes for free, and it meant there was a huge installed base of Blu-ray-capable homes before the studios made their call. Warner did the maths on an installed base that already existed.
The part that ages badly: nobody has repeated that trick. The Xbox Series S has no drive, the PS5 makes it an add-on, and 4K Blu-ray never got its trojan horse. Does anyone think physical media would be in better shape now if the PS5 had shipped with a disc slot as standard?
