Features

'It's VHS versus Betamax all over again!' That was the sinking feeling that pervaded the movie business throughout 2007, as two equally viable high definition (HD) disc formats competed to become the successor to DVD.

This time, however, the battle was shorter than in those early days of tape-based video recording - and this time Sony, whose arguably superior Betamax format lost out to VHS in the 1980s, came out on top. Between the summer and the end of the all-important Christmas sales period, several of the film industry's major players decided to throw their weight behind Sony's Blu-ray - in some cases having previously supported the Toshiba-led HD DVD camp - and finally Toshiba, in a display of good sense that's all too rare in these technology punch-ups, admitted defeat, withdrawing from development of HD DVD products and effectively killing the format.

That means we now know where the future of HD movie delivery lies. Or do we?

Well, although things may have moved on by the time you read this, not quite all of the boxes have been ticked on Blu-ray's application to be declared the must-have next-generation format. Many people have been looking to Apple for an independent lead in the HD drive dilemma. With arch-rival Microsoft backing HD DVD, and Sony, which shares many of Apple's interests and attitudes, being in the Blu-ray camp, it was always likely that Apple would come out in favour of Blu-ray. Now that the decision has been forced by the demise of HD DVD, it seems like a no-brainer for Macs to start shipping with Blu-ray drives. That wouldn't just be of interest to Mac users, it would also serve as a signal to the rest of the PC industry that Blu-ray had truly

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arrived.

Yet Apple has updated both its laptop and desktop Macs in the last couple of months, and none of the new machines have Blu-ray even as an option. Kenny Hemphill, deputy editor of MacUser magazine and experienced Apple-watcher, wonders if this is more than a temporary delay. 'Apple will never ship a Mac with a Blu-ray drive installed,' he predicted in February 2008. 'The reason, quite simply, is that the format will never take off. It's little more than a short-term stop gap until online delivery of movies and TV shows becomes the norm.'

Of course, Apple has every intention of ensuring that online delivery does become the norm as quickly as possible. The company's iTunes Music Store is hugely successful, not just in itself but as part of the iPod phenomenon that's brought record profits in recent years. AppleTV, recently revamped to cater better for video purchases, puts digital entertainment right in the living room, a clear attempt to shift downloading from being something fun you can do on your PC to being an everyday way of accessing music and movies. And Apple's services are the tip of an iceberg that's growing every day as more and more companies set up online entertainment stores.

Looking at it this way, Blu-ray's victory could seem a little hollow. Has it become the one and only optical drive for the future of home entertainment, at precisely the moment when it becomes clear that the future of home entertainment doesn't involve optical drives?

Disc versus download

Perhaps - but let's not get carried away. HD movies released on Blu-ray typically use about 20 megabits per second of storage, while most broadband connections are no faster than 4 megabit, so at the same quality it would take you five times longer to download a movie than to watch it. Remember, most iTunes movie downloads at the moment are at iPod resolution - barely VHS quality, let alone HD. And there are many places in the world where fast broadband access is less widespread, while there's a strong market for movies on disc. For the immediate future, downloading - even though it's undoubtedly going to continue to grow rapidly in popularity - is always going to involve some kind of compromise on quality, convenience and/or accessibility.