CES Trend #1: If the format war is over, what has Blu-ray really won?

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: When I was a boy (if I was a boy) growing up in that mighty metropolis I thought Oklahoma City to be at the time, my aunts and uncles would often make the 90-mile trek north to visit me in what my local weatherman lovingly referred to as "the Big Town." They'd arrive in a recent-model Ford stretch sedan that seated about 29 -- never a GM car, always a Ford, for it was Henry who got America through the depression and we all owed him a debt of gratitude.

The Ford LTD back then had a trunk large enough for a queen-size mattress, with room left over for a few sleepers. My Uncle Vernon, a retired chief of detectives, would use that trunk to haul back a month's supply of Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, and 7-Up -- not the knock-offs, but the "real" soft drinks, in glass bottles that clinked around in wooden crates. You couldn't always get the real soft drinks in Southern Oklahoma or Northern Texas, because the bottlers' trucking routes didn't extend very far south of us, or very far north of Dallas. Some people subsisted on Cragmont Cola, Dr. Wells, and Bubble-Up.

My cousins from the back seat of the LTD would beg to go to the movies, because the Big Town always got the first-run films. Not that going to the local theater in Lindsay, Oklahoma wasn't a hoot in itself, at a venue whose décor seemed best suited for the premiere of a Harold Lloyd film. But the Big Town had the Cinerama screens, the plush seats, the ushers with the hats, and on top of that, all the brands of candy -- the local Bunte brand, Brach's, Hershey's, Hollywood, Peter Paul, and the real M&Ms rather than the cheap knock-offs that tasted like buttons pinched off your granddad's overcoat. And we had twin theatres -- not just one screen but two! We had the luxury of choice in the Big Town.

It doesn't take a genius or even a respectably smart historian to know that when Americans want to be entertained or amused, their first requirement is to know that nothing is being held back from them. It's not so much that Americans need to see everything on the menu at one time. It's not only a comfort but a reassurance of their basic principles that Americans know they're not missing out on something to which they're entitled.

The very thought that anyone would invest time and money in an entertainment medium that was guaranteed, through the stubbornness of the very people producing it, to offer less than 100% of what should reasonably be available to them, is in hindsight one of the most bizarre, hare-brained collective mis-reads of American behavior on the part of any multi-billion-dollar industry in the history of commerce.

There are some consumers today who are willing or even eager to invest their time, energy, and money on a promise of a big reward in the future. But not all Americans are gamblers, and too many of us would prefer to gamble -- when we do gamble -- on something more fundamental to our futures than "high definition." If we're going to make the big trek north, if you will, we expect a payoff, not a promise. We won't drive 90 miles out of our way just to end up with a "gussied-up" version, to borrow an adjective from my aunt, of the little hometown theater on Second Street.

It is of little or no consequence to most everyone I've ever met that Blu-ray has more of a share of the available high-def movies than HD DVD; it's like comparing two half-empty bottles of soda. It doesn't much matter which one is closest to full; neither is particularly appealing if it's sitting up there for sale on the store shelf. You kinda wonder who's gotten into it.

And it isn't as though the television industry hasn't had an epic format battle before, or a hard time coming to a decision on either of two ways to go forward.
After World War II up until the early 1950s -- back when Uncle Vernon was on the beat and The African Queen was playing at the local theater in Lindsay -- there was a real format war in the television industry.

The debate was over how to put color on the picture tube. RCA had a system that directed the stream of electrons to painted points of color on the inside of the CRT, creating varying shades of the optical primaries red, green, and blue. CBS had a system with a spinning translucent wheel painted red, green, and blue, through which flickering images were beamed at such a speed and intensity that when they collided on the back side of the CRT and hung around for a few microseconds, they looked colorful.

Now, mind you, the difference between these two formats was gigantic, not aesthetic like the difference between Blu-ray and HD DVD. The RCA system had the advantage of not catching fire when left on for long periods of time, say, an hour. It also introduced the term compatibility from the sociologist's vernacular into the technological vocabulary, in that existing black-and-white sets could show pictures intended for color broadcasts.

Yet it was CBS that set an important standard, in one of technology's most influential battles. You see, thanks to RCA's huge legal department, the matter of which standard should prevail went to the US Supreme Court. And there, setting a precedent which the high court would follow later for picking the winner, it chose the CBS spinning wheel as the national standard. But the court case took so long that, in the meantime, RCA had flooded the market with inexpensive black-and-white sets -- compatible systems that could receive NBC's later color broadcasts.

The standard CBS set was for gracefully bowing out, when it appeared its cause was lost in the marketplace. The company made up a convenient excuse (it literally said the Korean War effort forced it to shift its priorities), and moved over to the RCA field-sequential system by 1954 to make amends. It was awkward at the time, but in retrospect, it was so graceful.

Everyone knows the government has a questionable track record of settling history-making disputes, so it's a good thing they stayed out of today's blue-laser battle. But what we're faced with now, too many years after someone had the bone-jarring idea of upping the frequency on the laser beam, are two sets of technology companies and content providers with differing stakes in the concept of high-definition, battling over the remains of the recorded video market. We are already seeing consumer apathy about the whole idea of having high-def movie discs and at the same time not actually, legally owning them, thanks to DRM, EULAs, and this ridiculous notion held by the studios that we're not all consumers but rather extended lessees of their content. And while we did see buyers a few months ago willing to place a hundred-dollar bet on a discount HD DVD player, for what it's worth, the market at large has rejected high-definition video on blue-laser disc.

So what is it that Blu-ray thinks it has won this week? Any student of history or even an amateur observer of public attitudes knows that you can't win an audience with half of a value proposition. If I know for a fact that a country I live in will only let me read 50% or 70% or 99% of the books printed in the world, for whatever reason it might concoct, I don't want to live in that country.

If I can only see 70% of the movies, I don't want to waste a nickel on the theater that would withhold from me the 30%. I'll drive the 90 miles north, thank you very much, in an LTD that gets 10 miles to the gallon, filled with 30 gallons of Ethyl and 50 gallons of 7-Up. There's a right comfortable place to stretch out in the back if you don't mind the crates and the clinking and the kids with their big bags of candy.