To answer that question, we have to go back to the beginning. Indeed, the old videotapes.

Back in the days we all watched movies on videotape and we had three standards to choose from at the time: Video2000 (Philips), Betamax (Sony) and VHS (JVC). V2000 quickly got shoved out of the picture due to being too expensive and Sony started a fierce battle against JVC which it ultimately lost. In the end, VHS – which in the beginning was technically inferior to both other standards – won the battle as it was the cheapest product on the market and got massive support (including from the porn industry). VHS ruled for years but got finally got overrun by a new medium: DVD.

That DVD completely obliterated VHS in only a couple of years shouldn’t come as a surprise. The new format was truly revolutionary and offered so much more than videotape that its victory was inevitable.

Whenever you play a videotape, the quality degrades and ultimately, you could just throw your tape away. Not anymore with DVD! Play it as much as you want and its impressive image quality will remain as it was when the movie got burnt on the disc. And what about sound? Finally we could get full Dolby Digital support in our living room, something that we couldn’t even dream of with VHS.

And that’s only the beginning. DVD came with scene selection, multiple language audio tracks and subtitles, and as cherry on the pie we even got a ton of additional content with the movie we bought. Suddenly a “Making Of” wasn’t some documentary we would see on regular TV at obscure time slots anymore but actually something we could watch whenever we wanted.

Maybe you already know all the things I’ve written above, but I think it’s necessary to show just how insignificant the new formats actually are. Blu-ray and HD-DVD are as much a revolution as Video-CD was compared to VHS. They’re an evolution at most but of course that’s not something the companies pushing the formats want you to realise.

I’ve told you just how big the step forward was between VHS and DVD, so now it’s time to see what Blu-ray and HD-DVD offer more than DVD to justify the hype.

In effect, the only thing Blu-ray disc and HD-DVD offer more at first glimpse is additional storage space. So, in theory publishers could use the additional storage to deliver better image and sound quality (less compression, different encoding) as well as more extras. Very nice, but what about the reality?

Instead of filling a DVD to the very last bit (which would suggest we need a new format with more storage capacity), we often see that publishers just don’t seem to care much. Low budget releases often have high compression ratios and no extras, leaving hundreds of MB’s on the DVD unused. So if a DVD isn’t already used to its full potential, why in hell would we need a new format that has even more storage space? The answer: we don’t. Not for movies at least.

To make the new formats more appealing to consumers, new software is being developed that can deliver additional advantages over DVDs including things like commentary tracks with picture-in-picture and some interactive features, but the bottom line is that none of the new stuff needs a new format. These “new features” are software-driven and as such could just as easily have been developed for DVD.

So why bother with the new formats? Well, games are getting bigger and bigger so game publishers could really use a new carrier to put them on (the same reason why cd-rom was quickly adopted to replace 3.5 inch diskettes) and since it already exists for games, the companies supporting Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD can just as easily use it for movies as well. After all, for publishers there are plenty of reasons to drop dvd and go for a new technology, more reasons than there are for consumers like you and me actually.

Having new technology adopted by consumers opens up a new market for sales of players, recorders and media. All the companies behind HD-DVD as well as Blu-ray are sure to make quite some profit if we all switch to the new standards. Add to that new copy-protection mechanisms and you can see why the movie industry is also pushing to get us jumping on the bandwagon. It’s all economics and has nothing to do with the “greater good” or “added value”. DVDs have become so cheap that the profit margins have decreased significantly so new ways of earning money have to be pushed.

You can see this already in the way for instance Warner is doing their movie releases at the moment. Big titles like Blood Diamond and 300 get stripped of their extras on DVD so that HD-DVD and Blu-ray get that advantage. We aren’t getting much additional value anymore, instead the things we’ve gotten used to are being taken away in order to force us to adopt the new kids in town.

So, are we being pushed into this new generation without having the need for it? Absolutely. Can we resist? Yes, but it won’t be so easy.

As Blu-ray and HD-DVD become more and more common in the average household (mainly through PS3, Xbox360 and computer peripherals) people will start buying HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies as the Lemmings they are. The average consumer believes the big industrial companies when they say that “new is better” even if they don’t offer anything we can’t have at a lower price right now. The only way that Blu-ray and/or HD-DVD can be stopped is if we continue buying DVDs, keeping that market very alive, and resist from buying movies on the new formats (much like how standards like Video-CD, CD-I and Minidisc were stopped).

Unfortunately, with game consoles being used as the frontline fighters for the new discs it becomes very easy for people to be persuaded and if DVD loses market share, we’ll quickly see it becoming extinct in favour for higher priced Blu-ray and/or HD-DVD.