Format War - 1990s

1990s

Philips' Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) vs. Sony's MiniDisc (MD): both introduced in 1992. Since affordable CD-R was not available until 1995, DCC and MD were an attempt to bring CD-quality recording to the home consumer. Restrictions by record companies fearful of perfect digital copies had limited an earlier digital system (DAT) to professional use. In response Sony introduced MiniDisc which provided a copy control system that seemed to allay record companies' fears. Philips introduced their DCC system at approximately the same time using the same copy control system. Philips' DCC was discontinued in 1996, however MD successfully captured the Asia Pacific market (e.g. Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.). The consumers in other parts of the world chose neither format, preferring to stick with analog Compact Cassettes for home audio recording, and eventually upgrading to CD recordable discs and lossy-compressed MP3 formats. MiniDisc systems are still available (though in the later Hi-MD format).

Rockwell X2 vs K56flex – In the race to achieve faster telephone line modem speeds from the then-standard 9.6 kbit/s, many companies developed proprietary formats such as V32.terbo (19.2 kbit/s) or TrailBlazer (23.0 kbit/s) or V.FAST (28.8 kbit/s), hoping to gain an edge on the competition. The X2 and K56flex formats were a continuation of that ongoing battle for market dominance until the V.90 standard was developed in 1999. For some time, online providers needed to maintain two modem banks to provide dial-up access for both technologies. (See "modem" for a complete history.)

Portable media digital hard drives, with several incompatible formats, both a small market of write-once optical drives (requiring the use of a protective, plastic carrier) and several more successful but also incompatible magnetic read-write cassette drives. The Iomega Zip format ultimately prevailed, with capacities of 100 and 250 megabytes (plus the rather less popular 750 MB), but these media and their drives were quickly supplanted by the much slower but far cheaper recordable compact disc CD-R (early models used a disc caddy to ensure proper alignment). The CD-R had the advantage of existing wide industry standards support (the Redbook standard for audio discs and the Yellowbook standard for data read-only CD), with the low-level recording format based upon the popular and low-cost read-only compact disc used for audio and data.

External bus transfer protocols: IEEE 1394 (FireWire) vs. USB. The proliferation of both standards has led to the inclusion of redundant hardware adapters in many computers, unnecessary versioning of external hardware, etc. Although FireWire has been marginalized to high-throughput media devices (such as high-definition videocamera equipment) and legacy hardware.

3D graphics hardware ports: AGP vs. PCI Local Bus. Again, the unnecessary duplication and competition of standards led to hardware incompatibilities, unnecessary versioning of display adapters and ports in motherboards, etc.

3D graphics APIs: DirectX vs. OpenGL vs. Glide API. In the latter half of the 1990s, as 3D graphics became more common and popular, several video formats were promoted by different vendors. The proliferation of standards (each having many versions with frequent and significant changes) led to great complexity, redundancy, and frustrating hardware and software compatibility issues. 3D graphics applications (such as games) attempted to support a variety of APIs with varying results, or simply supported only a single API. Moreover, the complexity of the emerging graphics pipeline (display adapter -> display adapter driver -> 3D graphics API -> application) led to a great number of incompatibilities, leading to unstable, underperforming, or simply inoperative software.

Video disc formats: MMCD versus SD. In the early 1990s two high-density optical storage standards were being developed: one was the MultiMedia Compact Disc (MMCD), backed by Philips and Sony, and the other was the Super Density disc (SD), supported by Toshiba, Matsushita and many others. MMCD was optionally double-layer while SD was optionally double-sided. Movie studio support was split. This format war was settled before either went to market, by unifying the two formats. Following pressure by IBM, Philips and Sony abandoned their MMCD format and agreed upon the SD format with one modification based on MMCD technology, viz. EFMPlus. The unified disc format, which included both dual-layer and double-sided options, was called DVD and was introduced in Japan in 1996 and in the rest of the world in 1997.

More video disc formats: VideoCD versus the DVD. While the MMCD and SD war was going on, Philips developed their own video format called the VideoCD. While the format was declared a flop in the US, in Europe and Japan the battle waged on fiercely, as the VideoCD's lower production cost (and thus sales price) versus the DVD's superior audiovisual quality and multimedia experience resulted in a split market audience, with one end wanting cheap media without minding the quality and multimedia richness, while the other willing to pay a premium for the better experience DVD offered. The battle was settled by the movie industry who rapidly refused to issue any more VCD discs once CD burners became available. Unlike DVD, VCD had no copy protection mechanism whatsoever.

Digital video formats: DVD versus DIVX (not to be confused with DivX). DIVX was a rental scheme where the end consumer would purchase a $2–3 disc similar to DVD but could only view the disc for 48 hours after the first use. Each subsequent view would require a phoneline connection to purchase another $2–3 rental period. Several Hollywood studios (Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount Pictures) initially released their movies exclusively in the DIVX format. However, video rental services found the multi-use DVD more attractive, and videophiles who collected films rejected the idea of a pay-per-view disc.

Memory cards, a four-way contest: CompactFlash vs. Memory Stick vs. MultiMediaCard / Secure Digital card vs. SmartMedia. The format war became a five-way contest with the introduction of xD-Picture Card in the next decade, although by then SmartMedia was falling into disuse. This ongoing contest is complicated by the existence of multiple variants of the various formats. Some of these, such as miniSD, are compatible with their parent formats, while current generations of Memory Sticks break compatibility with the original format. However, it appears that SD card is winning as of 2010, since companies such as Fujifilm, Olympus and Sony that had exclusively supported other formats in the past are now releasing products that can use SD cards.

Hi-fi digital audio discs: DVD-Audio versus SACD. These discs offered all the advantages of a CD but with higher audio quality. The players and discs were reverse compatible (the new Hi-fi players could play most 12 cm optical disc formats) but listening to the newer formats require a hardware upgrade. SACD was acclaimed by Sony marketeers as offering slightly better technical quality through its new PDM "bitstream" system and a greater number of SACD titles available. However, the two formats continue to coexist due to "hybrid" players that play both formats with equal ease. Neither DVD-Audio nor SACD won a significant percentage of the recorded audio market. A significant reason was the customer preference for easy-to-transport lossy compressed formats such as MP3 and AAC. Blu-ray Discs with PCM audio are currently gaining popularity as a replacement.

Television auxiliary video inputs: Composite video vs. S-video. Composite video inputs had more widespread support since they used the ubiquitous RCA connector previously used only with audio devices, but S-video used a 4-pin DIN connector exclusively for the video bus.

Wireless communication standards: Through the late 1990s, proponents of Bluetooth (such as Sony-Ericsson) and WiFi competed to gain support for positioning one of these standards as the de facto computer-to-computer wireless communication protocol. This competition ended around 2000 with WiFi the undisputed winner (largely due to a very slow rollout of Bluetooth networking products.) However, in the early 2000s, Bluetooth was repurposed as a device-to-computer wireless communication standard, and has succeeded well in this regard. Today's computers often feature separate equipment for both types of wireless communication, although Wireless USB is slowly gaining momentum to become a competitor of Bluetooth.

Disk image formats for capturing digital versions of removable computer media (particularly CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs): ISO vs. CUE/BIN vs. NRG vs. MDS vs. DAA, etc. Although the details of capturing images are complex (e.g., the oddities of various copy protection technologies applied to removable media), image formats have proliferated beyond reason - mainly because producers of image-creating software often like to create a new format with touted properties in order to bolster market share.

Streaming media formats: AVI, QuickTime (MOV), Windows Media (WMV), RealMedia (RA), MPEG, DivX, XviD, and a large host of other streaming media formats cropped up, particularly during the internet boom of the late 1990s. The wildly large number of formats is very redundant and leads to a large number of software and hardware incompatibilities (e.g., a large number of competing rendering pipelines are typically implemented in web browsers and portable video players.)