Sony CEO sees the light
...too bad it's too late.
Sony's CEO wishes he could go back and push the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray standards together:
Stringer admitted that the competition between Blu Ray and HD DVD had come to a "stalemate," and that if he could, he'd use time-travel to go back and bring both sides together.
I guess Sony should have thought of that before they refused to cooperate on a next-generation video disk standard. Who would have thought that two incompatible formats would be confusing to consumers, and not sell as well?
I wonder if Sony will learn its lesson about 'doing its own thing' with formats this time. Memory stick, apparently was a success. But with the Memory Stick, Sony actually was able to create a market for the format just by doing what it normally does: release devices which use it: the media format is dependent upon the success of the devices that use it, and Sony's devices (walkmans, PSP, etc) have always been successful. But the adoption of a next-gen DVD format is not like that: the players have no value without the disks.
And it really doesn't help that the Blu-ray players are still so expensive.
Comments
Sony's devices haven't always been successful. Their minidisc devices have found a bit of a niche in professional circles (radio journalism at least, unsure where else) but failed utterly as a consumer format. There were almost no studio releases in minidisc format -- and even then only those signed with Sony. The player only understood the proprietary ATRAC3 codec, and the software you had to use to load the devices (and convert audio) was terrible. Worse, since you were just burning to a disk, they were slow to load. There were also stupid anti-piracy design decisions, the consumer devices couldn't export from player to computer (The professional devices didn't have that limitation.)
... which is all a shame. The codec (er, at least ATRAC3Plus) was very cool, good quality and optimized for low power devices. The hardware was also very nice, my NetMD played 40 hours of music off a single alkaline AA battery... and the discs were durable, since they were in a case like a floppy.
... okay, so I guess I can't really count ATRAC3 against it, if it had to play MP3 I'm sure the battery life would have been dramatically lower.
In short, nice device that died because of stupid restrictions and decisions made by Sony.
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