High Definition Optical Disc Format War - Attempts To Avoid A Format War

Attempts To Avoid A Format War

In an attempt to avoid a costly format war, the Blu-ray Disc Association and DVD Forum started to negotiate a compromise in early 2005. One of the issues was that Blu-ray's supporters wanted to use a Java-based platform for interactivity (BD-J), while the DVD Forum was promoting Microsoft's "iHD" (which became HDi). A much larger issue, though, was the physical formats of the discs themselves; the Blu-ray Disc Association's member companies did not want to risk losing billions of dollars in royalties as they had done with standard DVD. An agreement seemed close, but negotiations proceeded slowly.

At the end of June 2005, Sun Microsystems, the developer of Java, announced that the Blu-ray Association had chosen the Java-based BD-J interactivity layer instead of Microsoft's HDi. This was based on a BDA board vote favouring BD-J 10 to 4, despite a technical committee previously favoring HDi by a vote of 7 to 5. At the same time, Microsoft and Toshiba jointly announced that they would cooperate in developing high-definition DVD players. In a top-level meeting in July, Microsoft's Bill Gates argued that the Blu-ray standard had to change to "work more smoothly with personal computers". The Blu-ray Disc's representatives defended the technology.

On August 22, 2005, the Blu-ray Disc Association and DVD Forum announced that the negotiations to unify their standards had failed. Rumors surfaced that talks had stalled; publicly, the same reasons of physical format incompatibility were cited. In the end of September, Microsoft and Intel jointly announced their support for HD DVD.

Hewlett Packard (HP) proposed an ultimatum for the Blu-ray Disc Association: adopt Microsoft's proprietary HDi (instead of the Java based system) and a mandatory managed copy feature, or HP would support HD DVD instead. In a research report, Gartner analysts Van Baker, Laura Behrens and Mike McGuire wrote that if HP's proposal were accepted, Blu-ray would become the winner of the format war. Though the Blu-ray Disc group did add mandatory managed copy to Blu-ray, they did not add HDi.

HD DVD players and movies were released in the United States on April 18, 2006. The first Blu-ray Disc titles were released on June 20, 2006 and the first movies using dual layer Blu-ray discs (50 GB) were introduced in October 2006.