Does anyone remember the great format war of the 70s between VHS and Betamax. It was a vicious take no prisoners war that left VHS the victor and betamax … well you don’t see them around anymore do you despite the fact that they had better quality. My strongest memory of it is going to the video store and there were the different types of tapes in different parts of the store, like dvds and tapes in the video stores these days.

You would have thought that the corporate world would have learned that a format war like the last one would be bad for business yet it happened all over again when high definition discs hit the market with Blu-ray heading against HD-DVD which is strange, if nothing else it is bad for business.

I was just reading that the war is over and it looks like Blu-ray has won the battle as Toshiba abandoned the HD DVD format which sees the fancy machines going the same way as those old betamax blocks that once played tape. Obviously Sony learnt from the last time since they backed beta.

I was just reading that the same war was played out again between Blu-ray and HD-DVD with two incompatible formats going head to head no holds bar war and once again one lost out to the other in this case Blu-ray trumped HD-DVD. I am guessing that Sony learnt from the last battle since they were fighting for beta and this time they were behind the Blu-ray coming out on top.

For the average consumer like myself, well it was all a bit confusing as to which was best out of the two. Some said one, some said the other and me, well i just didn’t want to fork out big on a machine that is going to be useless and unsupported if the other side won. I guess now it means i do have an excuse to buy a PS3