“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

A few months ago, many pundits seemed to suggest the HD-DVD standard (backed by Microsoft and Toshiba) was on the verge of outpacing Sony’s Blu-Ray in the worldwide race for catching most of the next-generation DVD players market. This issue is economically as crucial as was the fight between Betamax (Sony) and VHS (Matsushita) 25 years ago. The decision of the pornography industry to support HD-DVD was understood as a major move of the motion picture industry in general in favour of this technology. Moreover, the HD-DVD drives have always been cheaper than their Blu-Ray counterparts.

Indeed, the competition starts with the media powerhouses (AOL Time Warner, Fox, CBS-Viacom, NBC-Universal, etc…). Before spending billion dollars in transfering their blockbuster catalogue in a new disc format, they are waiting to know with which drives will consumers be equipped. But then PC manufacturers (including Lenovo, Dell, HP, Apple), are also waiting to know who’ll be the winner (in terms of media availability) before including any next-generation drive within their computers, and most notably their laptops (the bulk of the market, which is a crucial issue since replacing the built-in driver or adding an external one is not so easy).

So it is a sort of vicious circle – or more elegantly put, “negative feedback loops” – that actually prevents consumers to benefit improvements, even though the technological upgrades are possible (and cheap to implement).

The bad news here is that the latest data suggest a surge in the Blu-Ray drives equipment rate, thanks to the (moderate) success of the Playstation 3. Although the dics solds in both formats still mean quite low volumes, it is the first month since the introduction of  the two standards that Blu-Ray discs sold outnumber HD-DVD’s.

So it seems that the Blu-Ray is alive and kicking, despite what the porn industry may say. As a consequence, the fight between the two formats is still raging. And that means that I will not have the possibility to get hands on a laptop equipped with the “right” format before a couple of months. Actually I really do not have the need for a new one. But this could have been so, right ?

I still believe that competition is better than any other system in order to introduce innovation – and spread it within the economy. But competition can also sometimes seem quite painful, especially where cooperation could have avoided wasting much time and money…