The Pebble and the Avalanche

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Current Revolutions in Business and Technology

by Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky,

author of The Pebble and The Avalanche: How Taking Things Apart Creates Revolutions

 

Mon, 2009-Aug-03, 11:18

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The Format Wars: Shooting the Survivors

The format war over "high definition" successor to the DVD, fought between Blu-ray and HD DVD, ended in a victory for Blu-ray. Now it seems thismay have been a Pyrrhic victory.

Reports from China indicate that China's home-grown high definition format has a 30% market share advantage over Blu-ray. Blu-ray players have a built-in cost of $21 worth of licensing fees, and Blu-ray disks are about four times more expensive than a similar "CBHD" China Blue High Definition disk.

In other words, after a long hard scrabble between vendors for a share of the licensing fees, a different standard with a far lower cost structure is spreading rapidly through China. Like any other civil war, both sides in the West may very well have lost the battle over the next generation of DVDs.

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