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PS3: The New Betamax?
Posted by Michael Klassen on November 26, 2006 in Media
Here's a very thoughtful analysis of the PS3 launch, the competitors, and the realities of the gaming marketplace.
The Betamax reference is a little cruel, but there are parallels. The question of whether Blu-Ray Disc (BD) will be adopted as the next-gen disc media is a few years away. With the world going crazy for the phrase High Def or HD, you might expect that the HD-DVD format promoted by Toshiba & Microsoft might have a leg up.
I heard years ago the actual reason why VHS beat Betamax as the consumer's choice: porn.
Back in the 1980s, when you not only rented tapes from your local video store, you usually packed home a fairly heavy VCR and all the coax cables too. There was a reason many people went to the trouble. They could watch dirty movies in the privacy of their own homes, and the mass of video consumers made stars out of porn's elite players.
The casualty of this consumerism was Betamax. Sony apparently did not embrace distributors of adult videos early enough to rescue the format.
Will next gen Playstation games and high res mainstream movies be enough to make Blu-Ray the boss? Ultimately it will be content (even probably XXX-kind) and cost that will determine which format wins.
Tagged: blu-ray, favourite, hd, ps3, sony
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