This past weekend there was a very active and exciting discussion on standards wars in my Strategic Management class. The specific standards war being discussed was the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle. I was
very vocal (as I am known to be) that discussions of this standards war miss a much larger shift that is already underway. We are on the verge of moving away from content delivered via physical product towards a purely digital model. I was happy to see Forbes pay some attention to the specific companies and technologies leading this transition.
With Apple, Amazon.com, NetFlix and Microsoft pushing downloadable movies and cable and phone companies peddling a plethora of on-demand, high-definition content, the day is coming when the stacks of plain vanilla DVDs that clutter many home entertainment centers will go the way of the CD collection.
The increase in bandwidth and hard drive capacity in particular are brining us closer to a reality where all of our content comes down the pipe. I haven’t bought a CD in ages, and the only CDs I’ve bought in the last few years are for music that I was unable to find on any legitimate (or otherwise) digital store.
What trends could make me be wrong about this? For starters I could be drastically over-estimating the rate at which high-bandwidth penetration will reach the necessary tipping point. There’s also always the possibility that a “legacy” technology will continue to have takers within specific populations well into the future. People still use dial-up where there is no broadband or for redundancy. Portable CD players are still in use among groups that cannot afford the infrastructure one needs to use MP3 players (you need a computer and an MP3 player and sufficient computer literacy to use them together at the bare minimum).
Within the mainstream, though, I really do think the HD-DVD vs, Blu-Ray standards war is much less relevant than the video content standards wars that went before it.
