The Story of Blu-ray

The introduction of the CD in the early '80s resulted in an enormous leap from traditional media, offering a significant improvement in audio quality, along with a giant improvement in storage capacity. By the early 90's, demand for a new medium offering higher storage capacities rose, leading to the evolution of the DVD specification and a 5-10 x increase in capacity. This enabled high quality, standard definition video recording and distribution. The DVD format used the same form factor as the CD, allowing for seamless migration to the next generation format and offering full backwards compatibility.

1998-2006: Early Development of Blu-ray

In 1998, commercial HDTV sets began to appear in the consumer market; however, there was no commonly accepted, inexpensive way to play or record HD content. It was known that using lasers with shorter wavelengths would enable optical storage with higher density, and blue laser diodes were used in two projects started by Philips and Sony: UDO (Ultra Density Optical) and DVR Blue (together with Pioneer), a format of rewritable discs which would eventually become Blu-ray Disc (more specifically, BD-RE).

The first DVR Blue prototypes were unveiled in October 2000 at the CEATEC exhibition. However, because the Blu-ray Disc standard places the data recording layer close to the surface of the disc, early discs were susceptible to scratches and contamination and had to be enclosed in plastic cartridges for protection.

In February 2002, a group of companies (known as the Blu-ray Disc Founder group) announced the introduction of the Blu-ray Disc (BD) format (Sony, Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung). The first consumer devices were released on April 10, 2003 in Japan at a cost of approximately £2,500. However, there was no standard for pre-recorded video and no films were released for this player as a newer, more secure DRM system was required before Hollywood studios would accept it, not wanting to repeat the failure of the Content Scramble System used on DVDs.

In May 2004, the Blu-ray Disc Founders announced the creation of the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) to allow more companies to join their development. Some examples of companies that signed in include Apple, TDK, Dell, Hewlett Packard, The Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros. and Universal Music Group.

In January 2005, TDK announced that they had developed a hard coating polymer for Blu-ray Discs, allowing the plastic cartridges to be scrapped. The BD-ROM specifications were finalized in early 2006, and the first players were shipped in the middle of June 2006, though HD DVD players beat them in the race to the market by a few months. The first Blu-ray Disc titles were released later that month, with the earliest releases using MPEG-2 video compression (the same method used on DVDs). In September that year, the first releases using the newer VC-1 and AVC codecs were introduced, and the first movies using dual layer discs (50 GB) were introduced in October.

2002-2008: The Format Wars

The DVD Forum, chaired by Toshiba, decided to pursue its own blue-laser high-definition solution, and in August 2002, NEC and Toshiba announced their competing standard Advanced Optical Disc. It was renamed HD DVD the following year. HD DVD had a head start in the high definition video market and Blu-ray Disc sales were slow at first. The first Blu-ray Disc player was perceived as expensive and buggy, and there were few titles available. Hpwever, this all changed when the PlayStation 3 was launched, as every PS3 unit also functioned as a Blu-ray Disc player. By January 2007, Blu-ray discs had outsold HD DVDs, and during the first three quarters of 2007, they outsold HD DVDs by about 2:1.

In January 2008, Warner Brothers (the only major studio still releasing movies in both HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc format), announced that it would release only in Blu-ray Disc after May 2008. This led to a chain reaction in the industry, including major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Woolworths dropping HD DVD from their stores. In February, Toshiba withdrew its support for the HD DVD format, allowing Blu-ray Disc to become the industry standard for high-density optical disks.

Blu-ray Today

As soon as the format war ended, Blu-ray Disc began making serious headway; sales numbers showed that some titles, such as 20th Century Fox's "Hitman," up to 14% of total disc sales were from Blu-ray, although the average for the first half of the year was around 5%. According to Singulus Technologies AG, Blu-ray is being adopted faster than the DVD format was at the same period of its development, and a study by The NPD Group found that awareness of Blu-ray Disc had reached 60% of US households.