Scott King

    It would be a lie if I said I wasn’t interested in the DVD format war. I know I’m a geek but this is a HUGE deal. You see back in the 80’s there was VHS and Betamax. Betamax was a better quality but more expensive. So the country was split with some companies backing one version and some backing the other. Eventually VHS won the battle, but it slowed the progression of the medium and made things more expensive for us normal people.
    Right now, all the major studios are backing either Blu-Ray-DVD or HD-DVD. Even the Playstation 3 (blu-ray) and Xbox 360 (hd) are picking sides. For us consumers, things were NOT looking good.
    Until now.
    Just last week, a British media technology company put a patent out for technology that allows blu-ray and HD format to be put on the same DVD. It works by putting a thin-multilayer on the DVD which cost about 9 cents a disc (current DVD’s cost 5 to 6 cents a disc). This week, New Medium Enterprises announced that they were the ones to put out that patent and that the technology does in deed work.
    "Current technologies to create multiple layer disks mostly don't work. We've created a technology for mass production of multiple layers that does not suffer from the well known problem of low yields," said NME Chief Technology Officer Eugene Levich in a press release.
     A low yield means that many DVDs coming off the manufacturing lines are not working and have to be discarded.
     So anyway I’m super excited because if this is all for real then the DVD format war could be over. It wouldn’t matter which format studios backed because they would produce one DVD that would work for both.
     Of course, I believe that the next step after blu-ray/hd-dvds is a more advanced version of Video-on-Demand. I think it will reach a point where all TV shows and movies are kept online in a database. Then when you buy a movie/TV show you are allowed permanent access to that show and can watch it streaming off the web from any TV, computer, or portable device.
     With regular TV networks, instead of shows JUST airing at 8p.m. time slot, they will instead be posted/published on the web at 8p.m. and can be watched at anyone’s connivance.