Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are going
to do something a little different. I want you
to picture a shelf in a used video game store,
or maybe, you know, the bottom rack at a Goodwill.
You're scanning the spines of the DVDs, white,
black, clear cases, and then suddenly you see
it. A flash of translucent crimson red. The mark
of the fallen. The mark of the fallen, indeed.
We are talking about HD DVD. If you know the
name, you probably know it as the punchline to
a joke. It's the Betamax of the 2000s. Right.
The format that took on Sony's Blu -ray and got
absolutely crushed. It's often remembered as
a cautionary tale of, you know, backing the wrong
horse. But that narrative is actually incredibly
reductive. When you really dig into the engineering
papers, corporate memos and the timeline, HD
DVD wasn't some cheap knockoff. In many ways,
it was the superior product, at least initially.
That's what we're doing today. We aren't just
burying the body. We're doing the autopsy. We're
going to look at the technology that was arguably
ahead of its time, the corporate alliances that
turned Hollywood into a battlefield, and the
single month, January 2008. where a billion dollars
effectively evaporated into thin air. And we
have to talk about the Internet culture aspect
of this, too. Oh, yeah. Because while the suits
were fighting in boardrooms, there was a massive
guerrilla war happening on forums and tech blogs.
This was the first time the Internet really tried
to break a physical format security, and they
succeeded in spectacular fashion. Oh, the APS
hack. Yeah. We're definitely getting into the
dig revolt later. Yeah. But let's start with
the context. It's the mid -2000s. We all just
bought these heavy... expensive flat screen TVs.
Well, it's the first plasmas and LCDs. They say
HD ready on the box. We plug them in, turn on
the cable box, and it looks like garbage. It
looked awful. Right. You have this 720p or 1080i
display, but you're feeding it a standard definition
signal from a DVD or analog cable. The pixels
are being stretched. It looked muddy. The hardware
was there, but the content wasn't. We needed
a new disc. But why did we need a new laser?
This is the fundamental physics question. A DVD
holds 4 .7 gigabytes. Why couldn't we just squeeze
more data onto it? It comes down to the diffraction
limit of light. Think of a DVD player, like a
record player. You have a track spiraling out,
and you have pits and lands representing the
ones and zeros. To get high -definition 1080p
video, uncompressed audio, you need to store
about five or six times as much data as a standard
movie. So you need smaller pits, denser spiral
tracks. Exactly. But you can't read those smaller
pits with the old laser. Standard DVDs use a
red laser, which has a wavelength of 650 nanometers.
If you try to read tiny HD data with a red laser,
the beam is too fat. It's like trying to read
a fine print contract with a thick Sharpie. You
just blur everything together. So the industry
had to move down the spectrum. Towards the blue
violet end, both HD DVD and Blu -ray utilized
a blue violet laser with a wavelength of 405
nanometers. That shorter wavelength allows the
beam to be focused much, much tighter. I remember
reading about the specific beam spot size. It's
significantly smaller. Oh, it's a huge difference.
It allows for a track pitch, that's the distance
between the spirals of data, to shrink from 0
.74 micrometers on a DVD down to 0 .40 micrometers
on HD DVD. Wow. That tightening of the spiral
is where you get your capacity. And that capacity
jump was massive. We went from roughly 4 .7 kilobyte
on a DVD to 15 kilobyte on a single -layer HD
DVD. And 30 kilobyte on a dual -layer, which
pretty quickly became the standard for most movies.
And Blu -ray was even more right. They were promising
50 kilobyte. They were. Blu -ray had a slightly
higher numerical aperture on its lens, which
let them focus the beam even tighter. So their
capacity was 25 kilobytes per layer. So 50 kilobytes
for a dual -layer disc. Okay, so the physics,
the blue laser. is the same for both HD DVD and
Blu -ray. Sony and Toshiba both agreed, we need
blue lasers. So why didn't they just high -five
and build one format? Why did Toshiba peel off
and say, no, we're doing our own thing? This
is the billion -dollar question, and the answer
isn't about lasers. It's about plastic molding.
It's about the factory floor. The manufacturing
process. Right. Toshiba looked at the global
infrastructure for making DVDs. There were thousands
of these pressing plants. Toshiba's engineers
designed HD DVD to be physically identical to
a standard DVD in terms of layer depth. How so?
The data sits 0 .6 millimeters beneath the surface
of the disc. Which is exactly where it sits on
a regular DVD. Precisely. This meant that a factory
owner could take a standard DVD production line,
spend a few minutes swapping out the stamper
and doing a quick recalibration, and boom, they're
printing HD DVDs. Wow. The capital expenditure,
the capex, was minimal. It was a software upgrade
for the factory. Where's Blu -ray? Blu -ray was
a radical redesign. Sony decided to put the data
layer just 0 .1 millimeters from the surface,
almost right on top of the disc. Why do that?
What was the advantage? Theoretically, it reduces
something called birefringence. which is when
the laser beam splits as it passes through the
plastic. By having the layer so close to the
surface, they could use a more powerful lens
and get that higher data density we mentioned.
Okay, so there was an engineering reason. There
was. But practically, in 2006, it was a nightmare
because the data was so close to the surface,
if you sneezed on it, you scratched the data.
I remember the early prototypes had those caddies,
like the old mini disks. Yes. They were terrified
of scratches. They eventually developed a hard
coat polymer to protect it, pioneered by TDK.
But the manufacturing implications were huge.
You couldn't use a DVD line. You had to build
entirely new factories, new molding machines,
new bonding processes. It was expensive. So Kashiba's
pitch to the Hollywood studios and the replicators
was, hey, we can give you HD and it won't cost
you a fortune to retool your supply chain. It
was a very compelling economic argument. Evolution,
not revolution. And that's why initially the
governing body of the industry sided with them.
The DVD forum. This is where the politics start
getting messy. The DVD forum is the group that
holds the trademark for the DVD logo. If you
want to put that DVD logo on your player, you
answer to them. In the early 2000s, they had
to choose a successor. And there wasn't just
two options, right? There were a few. Oh, yeah.
There was a Warner Bros. proposal to just use
a special high density DVD nine disc. But it
came down to two main camps, Toshiba and NEC
with their advanced optical disc and Sony and
Phillips with what was then called DVR Blue,
which became Blu -ray. And in 2003, they voted.
They did. And they voted to approve the advanced
optical disc, which was renamed HD -DVD. So,
legally speaking, HD -DVD was the official successor.
Blu -ray was the rogue faction. It's funny to
think of Sony as the rebel alliance here. They
were. They broke away from the forum and created
their own consortium, the Blu -ray Disc Association.
But they had the weight of the PlayStation behind
them, which we'll get to. But before the war
fully broke out, there was a moment where peace
seemed possible. The failed peace treaty of 2005.
This is one of the great what -ifs of consumer
electronics. In 2005, Kunitake Ando from Sony
and Teraki Ryug from Toshiba actually met. They
knew a format war would hurt sales. Consumers
hate confusion. They tried to merge the formats.
I've read about this. The idea was to maybe use
the Sony physical disk. the 50 GB Blu -ray structure,
but use the Toshiba software and file structure.
That was one proposal. Another was to create
a hybrid disk that contained both. But it fell
apart over two main issues. First, the physical
structure. Toshiba just did not want to give
up that manufacturing advantage we just discussed.
It was their ace in the hole. And what was the
other issue? The second wedge was software. And
this is where Microsoft enters the chat. Microsoft
hated Blu -ray, like actively despised it. They
did. Because Blu -ray chose Java, specifically
a version called BDJ, as its interactive layer.
Sun Microsystems Java. Right. And you have to
remember, in the mid -2000s, Microsoft and Sun
were not friends. Microsoft viewed Java as a
platform threat to Windows. They didn't want
Java becoming the standard operating language
for the living room. So Microsoft threw its weight
behind HD DVD. because Toshiba agreed to use
IHD. Yes, later called HDI for High Definition
Interactive. It was based on XML, HTML, CSS,
and JavaScript. It was web tech. Stuff that web
developers already knew. Exactly. Microsoft argued
it was lighter, faster, and easier to code for.
And honestly? They were right. We'll get to the
user experience in a bit, but I remember early
Blu -ray menus being sluggish disasters compared
to HD DVD. Because Jada is heavy, it requires
a virtual machine to run. Asking a 2006 Arrow
disc player chip to run in Java VM was like asking
a pocket calculator to run Photoshop. It was
brutal. So the peace talks collapse in August
2005. The lines are drawn. On the red side, Toshiba,
NEC, Sanyo, Microsoft, Intel. A huge part of
the PC ecosystem. And on the blue side, Sony,
Philips, Panasonic, Pioneer, Dell, Apple. All
the big consumer electronics giants. And HP was
this interesting wild card. They tried to broker
a deal demanding Blu -ray use Microsoft's IHD.
When Blu -ray refused, HP threatened to support
HD DVD. It was a mess. A massive corporate proxy
war. The PC industry largely leaned toward HD
-DVD because of the easier file structure and
managed copy features. Which we'll get to. The
consumer electronics giants leaned toward Blu
-ray because they wanted the higher potential
capacity and, frankly, the patent royalties.
Oh, yeah. The royalties were a huge part of the
calculation for Sony. So let's go to launch day.
HD -DDD hits the market first. March 31st, 2006
in Japan. April 18th in the U .S. They beat Blu
-ray by a solid two months. The first player
was the Toshiba HD -A1. It was a tank. Have you
ever lifted one of these? It weighed nearly 20
pounds. It was an absolute monster. I have, and
I remember the boot time. You'd press the power
button, go make a sandwich, come back, and maybe
the tray would be open. That's because it wasn't
really a consumer electronics device. It was
a Pentium 4 computer stuffed into a VCR casing
running a custom version of Linux. It was a prototype
sold as a product. So it was literally a PC.
It was. But... It worked. The first movies were
The Last Samurai, Million Dollar Baby, and The
Phantom of the Opera. And they looked amazing.
It did, and it was $499. Which sounds like a
lot, but the first Samsung Blu -ray player that
launched a few months later was $1 ,000. $1 ,000.
A grand. And the picture quality on the Toshiba
was arguably better at launch because they used
better codecs. Let's talk about that picture
quality, because I think people assume Blu -ray
won because it looked better. But in 2006, that
wasn't true at all, was it? Not at all. In fact,
the first batch of Blu -ray releases were disastrous.
Sony was so rushed to get to market, they used
the old MPEG -2 compression, the same stuff used
on standard DVDs, just at a higher bitrate. But
MPEG -2 is really inefficient for high definition.
It's terrible for HD. So the launch title, The
Fifth Element on Blu -ray, looked awful. It was
grainy, full of compression artifacts. It was
barely better than an upscale DVD. And HD -DVD.
HD -DVD launched using VC1, which was Microsoft's
advanced video codec, a descendant of Windows
Media Video. It was hyper -efficient. So even
though HD -DVD had less storage space, 30 GB,
versus Blu -ray's potential 50 GB, the video
looked cleaner because the compression was smarter.
This connects to the modern day, actually, the
VC1 codec. That's the grandfather of the streaming
codecs we use now. Absolutely. The codec war
inside the format war was just as important.
Eventually, both formats adopted AVC or H .264,
which is what runs YouTube and Netflix and basically
all internet video today. But HD DVD championed
those advanced codecs first. And the audio was
better too, right? Mandatory support for Dolby
True HD and DTS HD high -resolution audio. Blu
-ray's initial players didn't even have to support
the best audio formats. It was chaos. So 2006
rolls on. HD DVD is cheaper. It looks better.
The cases are red. which is a nice distinction.
But then in November, Two heavyweights under
the ring, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360
HD DVD drive. This is the strategic divergence
that probably decided the war. Sony took a massive,
massive gamble. They put the Blu -ray drive inside
every single PlayStation 3. Which made the PS3
expensive. $599. $599 US dollars. I can still
hear the meme. It was exorbitantly expensive
and Sony lost hundreds of dollars on every unit
sold. But it meant that overnight, millions of
people accidentally owned a Blu -ray. It was
a separate little white box that you plugged
in via USB. It cost $199. And it came with a
copy of King Kong. That's right, the Peter Jackson
King Kong, a great demo disc. I remember the
logic at the time was, we are giving gamers a
choice. We aren't forcing you to pay for a movie
player if you just want to play Halo. It was
a respectful consumer choice, but a fatal strategic
error. By making it optional, they ensured the
install base would never match the PS3. If Microsoft
had bitten the bullet, and put the HD DVD drive
inside the Xbox 360, even if it raised the price
by $50 or $100, HD DVD likely would have won.
But the blue laser diodes were expensive, right?
It was a big part of the cost. Incredibly expensive.
Around $100 to $150 per unit initially. Microsoft
didn't want to blow up the cost of the console.
They were also already looking ahead to digital
distribution. They saw discs as a temporary bridge.
Whereas Sony saw discs as the future of their
empire. Sony is a media company. They make movies,
music, and the hardware to play them on. For
them, owning the physical format was everything.
So we move into 2007. The war is a stalemate.
You have studios picking sides. Universal and
Warner Bros. are strongly in the HD DVD camp
initially. Universal was exclusively HD DVD for
a long time. Disney and Fox are strictly Blu
-ray. And then you have Paramount, who did this
weird thing where they flipped. Paramount was
the big shock of 2007. They had been releasing
on both. And then in August, they announced they
were going HD DVD exclusive. Why? Money. The
HD DVD promotion group paid them a reported $150
million in marketing incentives. So this was
just studios being bought off left and right.
It was. And this is where the user experience
gap started to widen. If you were a film nerd
in 2007, an early adopter, you probably preferred
HD DVD for a few key reasons. Reason number one.
Region free. Huge. Absolutely massive for collectors.
Blu -ray maintained the old DVD region codes.
Region A for the Americas and Japan. Region B
for Europe and Australia. Region C for Asia.
Right. If you imported a cool horror movie from
France, which is region B, and tried to play
it on your American PS3, which is region A, it
would spit it out with an error message. Useless.
HD DVD had zero region coding. The world was
one region. A disc from Japan played in a player
from Ohio? No problem. I remember. importing
Pan's Labyrinth on HD DVD from Europe before
it came out in the U .S., it felt like I was
cheating the system. It was a feature that built
immense loyalty among the early adopter crowd,
the influencers of that era, the people posting
on the AVS forum. Reason number two, the combo
disc. I have a love -hate relationship with these.
The flipper discs, a dual -layer DVD on one side,
a dual -layer HD DVD on the other. The marketing
pitch was genius. Buy it now. Play the DVD side
in your bedroom. Play the HD side in your living
room. It future -proofed your collection. It
was smart. It was a bridge for consumers who
hadn't upgraded yet. But physically, a nightmare.
No label art, just small text on the inner ring.
Fingerprints everywhere. And they were prone
to rot or bonding separation because the glue
chemistry was tricky. But again, it showed Toshiba
was trying to bridge the transition for normal
people. Blu -ray didn't really have an equivalent.
Not really. They had some PlayStation 3 bundle
discs, but nothing as elegant as the combo disc
concept. Then you had the twin -format disc,
which was a single -sided disc with three layers,
one for DVD, two for HD DVD. That was even more
clever, but harder to manufacture. The combo
disc was the main one people saw. And then there
was the 3X DVD hack. This is something I feel
very few people knew about. This was the poor
man's HD. Because the file structure of HD DVD
was so flexible and the codecs were so efficient,
you could actually burn 1080p video onto a standard
red laser DVD -R you bought at Office Depot.
Wait, explain that again. High definition on
a standard DVD? Yes. A dual -layer DVD holds
about 8 .5 gigabits. If you used the efficient
AVC codec, H .264, you could fit a 90 -minute
movie in 1080p on that disc. The official Toshiba
players recognized it as an HD DVD file structure.
structure and played it back in full HD. That's
wild. It's like putting jet fuel in a lawnmower
and having it actually fly. It was officially
supported in the spec. It was called HD Rec.
It was a brilliant engineer solution to expensive
media. The blank HD DVD -Rs were pricey. Blank
DVD -Rs were a dime a dozen. Okay, we have to
pause here and talk about the biggest drama of
the era. The ASES hack. The 09F9 number. This
wasn't just about movies. This was an internet
censorship war. This is one of my favorite stories
in tech history. So ACS, Advanced Access Content
System, was the encryption used by both formats.
The studios were told it was unbreakable. Unbreakable.
Famous last words. Of course. In late 2006, a
hacker who went by the name Muzlik64 found a
vulnerability. Not in the disc itself, but in
the software player WinDVD running on a PC. He
managed to scoop the processing key out of the
computer's memory while the movie was playing.
And this key... unlocked everything. It was the
master key. With the 16 -byte number, you could
decrypt any HD DVD released up to that point.
It was a skeleton key for the entire format.
And naturally, he posted it on the internet.
On the Doom 9 forums, a haven for video enthusiasts
and software crackers. And naturally, the AACS
licensing authority, the lawyers, freaked out.
They started sending cease and desist letters
to everyone. Google, bloggers, forums. And then
they made the mistake of going after Digg. For
the Gen Z listeners, Digg was Reddit before Reddit.
It was the front page of the internet. User posted
the key. The dig admins, terrified of being sued,
deleted the post and banned the user. Bad move.
Terrible move. The community revolted. They realized
the admins were censoring the information for
corporate interests. So suddenly thousands of
people started posting the key. I remember the
front page. It was a wall of that number. 09
F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. It's
burned in my brain. They embedded it in haiku.
They made songs about it. They photoshopped it
onto t -shirts. There was a famous image of the
key printed on a flag being waved by a Revolutionary
War soldier. It was the Streisand Effect nuclear
explosion. By trying to hide it, they made it
the most famous number on the internet. Exactly.
And practically, what did this mean for HD DVD?
It meant HD DVD was cracked wide open. You could
rip the movies to your hard drive easily with
a tool called backup HD DVD. Blu -ray was also
cracked eventually, but Blu -ray had an extra
optional layer of security. called BD +, which
was a tiny virtual machine that ran on the player
and could dynamically change the encryption code
on the disc. It was much harder to break. HD
DVD didn't have that. No. Once the processing
key was out, the game was over. So the studios
looked at HD DVD and saw a format that was wide
open to piracy. Exactly. Fox and Disney were
terrified of piracy. The fact that HD DVD security
was obliterated so publicly. Definitely made
them cling tighter to Blu -ray. It was a PR disaster
for the format, even if it was a victory for
internet freedom. So, late 2007, the hackers
have the key, the prices are dropping, Toshiba
does a fire sale. The HD A2 player hits $99.
This was the final push. Toshiba was losing a
ton of money on every player trying to buy market
share. They sold a ton of units. I bought one.
I think a lot of people did. It was the cheapest
way to get into HD media. At the end of 2007,
things were looking... okay for them not great
but okay by some metrics there were arguably
more dedicated hdd dvd players in homes than
dedicated blu -ray players if you don't count
the ps3 and that's the big asterisk isn't it
the ps3 it's the 800 pound gorilla in the room
but still it felt like a real fight and then
january 2008 ces The Consumer Electronics Show
in Vegas. The atmosphere was tense. Everyone
knew something was going to give. Warner Bros.
was the linchpin. They were the only major studio
still consistently releasing on both formats.
They accounted for something like 20 % of the
entire home video market. Whichever way Warner
went. The war went. Totally. And there were rumors
that Warner was going to side with HD -DVD. I
remember that. There was a leaked ad for a promotion
with Toshiba. Exactly. Toshiba had a massive
party planned. They had promotional materials
printed. Their press conference was one of the
big events on the schedule. And then January
4th. A Friday? Just before CES officially kicks
off, the press release drops. Warner Bros. to
distribute high -definition DVD releases exclusively
in Blu -ray disc format. Boom. It was a bomb.
The Toshiba executives reportedly found out about
it just hours before the public did. They had
to cancel their entire CES press conference.
It was humiliating. They were blindsided. Why
did Warner switch? The press release said consumer
confusion. That was the official line. That's
the PR answer. We are doing this for you, the
people. The real answer. We need to follow the
money. The briefcase full of cash. It was a very,
very big briefcase. There have been credible
reports and industry analysis suggesting that
the Blu -ray Association, led by Sony -paid Warner
Bros., somewhere in the neighborhood of $400
to $500 million. Half a billion dollars. In promotional
fees and other incentives to switch. They basically
bought them. To end the war. Essentially. Fox
also reportedly guides some incentives to stay
blue. It was a checkbook war. Sony looked at
their bank account. looked at the potential royalty
stream from Blu -ray licensing for the next 10
years, and decided it was worth paying half a
billion to kill the competition. And once Warner
tipped... The dominoes fell instantly. Within
days, Netflix said, we're phasing out HD DVD
rentals. Best Buy said, we're recommending Blu
-ray to our customers. And then the biggest one
of all, Walmart. The king of retail. Walmart
announced they were going Blu -ray exclusive.
And you can't survive without Walmart. No. Once
Shell Space is gone... You are dead. That was
the final nail. So on February 19, 2008, Toshiba
officially surrenders. They announce they are
ceasing development and manufacturing of all
HD DVD products. The war ends. Total duration,
less than two years. Toshiba wrote off nearly
a billion dollars in losses. It was a financial
catastrophe for their consumer electronics division.
The HD DVD promotion group was formally dissolved
on March 28. It was over. And for the consumer,
I want to go back to the guy who bought that
$99 player in December 2007. Two months later,
he owns a doorstop. It was a feeling of betrayal.
I remember the forums. People were furious. I
backed you and you quit. Now, to be fair, the
player still worked. The discs you own still
played. But no new movies were coming. And firmware
updates continued for a while, right? They did.
Toshiba was pretty good about that. But what
good is a player with no new content? Warner
Bros. did offer an exchange program, right? Eventually,
in mid -2009, it was clunky. You had to mail
in the paper cover art from your HD DVD case,
literally rip the paper out. So you destroyed
your old copy. You had to. And you had to send
a check for $4 .95 plus shipping for each disc.
And they would mail you the Blu -ray disc. But
not the Blu -ray case. Nope. Just the disc in
a paper sleeve. And crucially, they didn't give
you a Blu -ray player. So you had a stack of
blue discs and a red player. It was a token gesture
at best. Let's look at the long tail here. Because
the format didn't just vanish from the earth
the next day. There were some weird zombie releases.
The release schedule takes time to stop. The
last major U .S. releases came out in May 2008.
Things like Into the Wild, P .S. I Love You,
and Twister. Twister was a late release. Wow.
Yep. But my favorite story is Freedom 6, the
anime. Yes. Bandai Visual had released the first
five volumes of this OVA series on HD DVD. The
sixth volume was scheduled for June 2008, months
after the format died. They released it anyway.
Just to finish the set for the fans. That's kind
of classy. Out of honor. They knew they wouldn't
make money. The press release literally acknowledged
the format's demise, but they couldn't leave
the fans with five -sixths of the show. But here
is the kicker. There was a volume seven. Oh,
no. And volume seven was never released on HD
DVD. So even with that noble gesture, the set
remains forever incomplete on the shelf. It's
like a perfect little tragedy. That is heartbreaking.
But there were even later releases than that,
right, from some indie companies. Oh, yeah. A
company called Amphim Films released Deadlands
2. Trapped and Deadlands? The rising on HD -DVDR
as late as 2010. They were limited runs of like
500 copies. True collector's items now. But there
is a place where HD -DVD lived on in disguise.
We have to talk about China. Ah, CBHD. The China
Blue High Definition Disc. This sounds like a
bootleg, but it was an official government -backed
standard. It was. China looked at the format
war. They saw Blu -ray won. But Blu -ray licensing
fees were expensive. Sony wanted a cut of every
disc and player made. Chinese manufacturers didn't
want to pay that. So they looked at the wreckage
of HD DVD. And said, we'll take that. They licensed
the HD DVD physical specs from the DVD forum
because, remember, those factories were cheap
to convert. That original advantage still held.
They tweaked the modulation code, added their
own Chinese -owned audio and video codecs called
AVS to avoid paying royalties to Dolby and others,
and launched CBHD in 2008. Just as it was dying
here, it was being reborn there. And it was successful.
For a few years, CBHD outsold Blu -ray in China.
Warner Bros., the same studio that killed HD
DVD in the U .S., actually released Harry Potter
and Blood Diamond on CBHD in China. Because money
is money. Exactly. It proved that the technology
wasn't flawed. It was perfectly capable. It just
needed a different business model without the
crushing royalty fees. We also saw some hardware
mutations right at the end. The universal players.
LG and Samsung both tried this. The LG BH100
Super Multi Blue. It played both formats. I remember
that thing. It was a beast. And it was expensive.
It was $1 ,200. And it was buggy. It couldn't
even decode Dolby True HD. If that player had
launched in 2006 for $300, do you think the war
would have even happened? I think we would have
ended up in a DVD audio versus SACD situation
or Dolby Vision versus HDR10, where both formats
coexist because the hardware hides the difference
from the consumer. Yeah. If universal players
had been cheap and available early, consumers
wouldn't have cared which color the case was.
They'd just buy the movie. But the chips to read
both formats from companies like Broadcom and
NEC came too late. And there were computer drives,
too. Yeah. Laptops with HD DVD drives. Yeah,
Peshiba had their Quasimodo line. HP had some
pavilions. They were pretty rare, but they existed.
Which brings us to another part of the legacy.
Which is? The digital copy. Every HD DVD seemed
to come with a way to move the movie to your
PC. That was the managed copy feature Microsoft
pushed. They saw the future. They knew people
wanted to watch movies on laptops and portable
devices. It was built into the HDI spec. You
could put the disc in your computer, authenticate
it, and get a standard Windows media file you
could put on your Zoom. Ah, the Zoom. Another
fallen soldier. A topic for another day. But
Blu -ray eventually caught up with their digital
copy disks. But HD DVD was natively designed
to integrate with your home network and your
PC. It was more forward thinking. Which brings
us to the ultimate irony of this entire story.
The irony of timing. We spent 2006, 2007, and
2008 obsessing over bitrates, disk layers, and
red versus blue cases. billions of dollars were
spent meanwhile in 2007 netflix launched its
watch now service to streaming the quality was
terrible at first standard def postage stamp
sized video But the pipe was opening. And the
iPhone launched in 2007. The whole paradigm was
shifting under their feet. Exactly. We were fighting
a vicious trench war for control of physical
media right at the moment that physical media
was beginning its slow march toward obsolescence.
Warner Bros. switched to Blu -ray to unblock
the market and get people buying discs again.
And they did, for a while. Blu -ray had a good
run. But it never reached the sales heights of
DVD. Never. DVD was the peak. It was a cultural
phenomenon. Blu -ray was a profitable plateau
for enthusiasts. But today, physical media is
a niche market for collectors, people like us
who want the absolute best bitrate and uncompressed
audio. The average person hasn't bought a disc
in a decade. So in a way, Microsoft was right.
They were. They treated the optical drive as
an optional accessory because they knew the future
was a downloaded file on a hard drive. They lost
the battle of 2008, but they won the war of the
2010s with Xbox Live and digital distribution.
So let's wrap this up. If you're listening to
this and you have an HDA -1 sitting in your attic
or maybe you find a copy of the thing in a red
case at a garage sale. Pick it up. It's a piece
of history. It represents a moment where a perfectly
viable, cheaper, more consumer -friendly technology
was crushed by a massive alliance of industry
titans and a half -billion -dollar check. And
the red cases just look cool on the shelf. They
really do. They pop. It's a beautiful design
object. So here's the final thought to leave
you with. We talked about the Xbox 360 add -on
drive. What if Microsoft had gone all in? What
if they had put an HD DVD drive inside every
single Xbox 360 from day one? Would the extra
30 million players in the market have been enough
to save the format? Would we all be watching
movies out of red cases today with region -free
disks and menus built on web tech? It's the great
what if, but perhaps the most provocative thought
is this. The whole war, this billion -dollar
fight over plastic discs, felt incredibly important
at the time. But in hindsight, it was a battle
for a shrinking kingdom. Streaming was just around
the corner, preparing to make them all obsolete
anyway. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive
into the format war. We'll catch you on the next
one.