HTSA: Format War Victory Paves the Way for Disc-less Blu-ray

On Tuesday, Toshiba announced it will stop shipping HD DVD products by the end of March, essentially ending a high-definition DVD format war with Sony-backed Blu-ray.

As the dust clears, the Home Theater Specialists of America (HTSA), a 60-member specialty electronics retailers buying group, offers its reaction.

The best format won, according to director of training and public relations David Berman. He says the Blu-ray triumph will benefit consumers and dealers while catalyzing technology innovation.

HTSA's position is noteworthy, according to Berman, because it's made up of resellers that "sell trusted expertise, not products and brands."

Berman adds, "We have a unique ability to sift through all of the thousands of products and brands and provide customers with what we believe are the best values."

The best value is Blu-ray, HTSA stated in September 2007, with Berman highlighting the technology differences in a white paper. The statement also came as a result of HTSA companies' sales trends.

"We saw that 93 percent of sales in our businesses were Blu-ray," Berman says. "The entire [remaining] 7 percent came from a combo player. It seemed that the only people buying the combo were worried about who was going to win."

Another group that appears to endorse HD DVD, Berman acknowledges, is gamers. "I think the only people who were nervous about [the format war] from the get-go were the gamers who had invested in Xbox," he says.

"That was the catalyst for HD DVD -- the gaming industry, not home entertainment."

According to Berman, home entertainment stands to benefit from Blu-ray's victory in the following ways:

Blu-ray is simply better. Berman says Blu-ray has a thinner surface coating and lower aperture of the laser system, allowing deeper use of the disc for better storage capacity and speed.

"Overall, we thought as soon as it caught up on the audio codec side of things it would surpass HD DVD in every aspect. That proved to be true."

The thinner surface coating is also the only downside to Blu-ray that Berman sees, because that makes it more susceptible to scratches.

Innovation can now flourish. The short-term goal for manufacturers is to eliminate media and having a format war between two types of media discs blurred that goal, Berman says.

Even though Blu-ray is a disc, its victory will help bring consumers closer to a disc-less world, he predicts. "Now there is a coalition of 150 some odd manufacturers that bought into a format transition" and can focus on advancing that format toward eliminating discs, he says.

"Now that that muddiness has been removed we have an unimpeded path to the next level of technology."

Consumers purchase with confidence; Dealers sell to confident consumers. Not only HTSA dealers, but all resellers of high-definition disc players can be completely certain that they are selling clients the best available format.

According to Berman, that confidence will spur growth.

The war wasn't helping HDTVs. The immensely popular flat-panel HDTVs that are the hallmark of the specialty electronics industry need a logical companion, Berman says.

With the format war over, high definition TVs and a logical high-definition disc player can become logical companion products.