Yes format wars do indeed suck big weenies. A product of huge corporations with even bigger ego's throwing their weight around regardless of which one is better. The biggest problem is that consumers are the one's who ultimately get caught in the crossfire. Usually the lines are drawn up pretty evenly. I mean if HD DVD had only had a 5% market share, then it wouldn't even be considered a war. But when it's closer to 30 - 40%, then that leaves a lot of people who have invested their hard earned money on the format, out in the cold.
If there was a format war going on when the industry changed over from VHS to DVD then I don't remember it. All I remember was all of a sudden DVD's popped up & they were a quadrillion times easier to use than VHS tapes. So the choice was clear, you either kept buying VHS tapes and hoped DVD's would go away, or you started buying DVD's.
I was actually a bit stubborn (didn't know they were a quadrillion times better) when DVD's came out. It was due to the fact that I had built my car stereo system around cassette's (reversable, pro-logic Kenwood tape deck, and about 400 cassette tapes in my collection), and when CD's came out I was refusing to have to go replace all of my cassette tapes, so I didn't buy into CD technology for years. All my friends would tell me how much better CD's were, but I refused to listen. I would give reasons like, "well tapes don't skip when you're driving down the road (the first generation auto CD players were notoriously bad about skipping when going over even the slightest bumps), plus you can record your own tapes (CD's took a while to come out with burning capabilities), plus they're too small... you can fit hundreds of those things in a tiny little case, which makes it too easy for a thief to make off with your ENTIRE music library"!!!
They were all lame excuses. Truth be told I was very interested in CD's, but felt like I had invested way too heavily in cassette's to change over to the different format. Then I heard about the new digital tape format (D.A.T.) that was supposedly going to come out and blow away CD's, and the D.A.T. players would play regular cassettes, so I wouldn't have 400 worthless tapes layng around, I could just add on to my library with the new digital tapes. So that news really solidified my resolve to stay away from CD's. I figured I'd let all my buddies waste their time and money on CD players, and I would wait for D.A.T. to take over the market and be the last one laughing when I became the 1st person with a D.A.T. player in my car.
Well, I doubt many of you even heard of D.A.T. let alone saw any products on the shelves anywhere. That pretty much sums up what happened with D.A.T.... NOTHING!!! I really don't know if the audio signal was better on the D.A.T. tapes than CD's or not, but once consumers got ahold of CD's, and the ease of use that came along with them, they weren't about to go back to screwing around with rewinding, fast forwarding, tape players eating your tapes or anything else that had to do with cassettes. CD's were the future and nothing was going to stop them. When I got together with my first wife in 1993, she had a huge CD collection and a CD player. That was the 1st time I ever messed around with a CD personally... I instantly fell in love with being able to skip to whatever song I wanted to listen to without having to hit the search button on my tape player. It was like all of a sudden I 'GOT IT'..... "Ahhhhh, so THIS is why every single person I know switched over to CD's and tried to convince me to as well"!!! I felt like a fool really. Hell who am I kidding, I WAS a fool! Such a fool that I let my stubborness about switching over from tapes to CD's carry over into my refusal from switching over from VHS to DVD's. I despised everything that had to do with those little disks... UNTIL I tried them out for myself. Once I tried both CD's & DVD's it was like hitting a crack pipe, I was instantly hooked and wanted MORE!!!
So anyways, my point (before I took off on that ridiculously long tangent) was that I don't recall anything except standard DVD's being available when the industry switched over from VHS. But that could be due to the fact that I wasn't in the game (so to speak) at that time. I was too busy buying or renting VHS tapes. So if there was a format war back then, I missed it. But I do remember the 'Beta vs VHS' war a little bt. We lived in Littleton, Colorado at the time (1980), and I remember my friend down the street having one of those enormously huge Beta tape players and showing us movies on it. Of course I was only 9 years old so it wasn't like I was doing any critical comparison's against our other neighbor who had a VHS player. And yet another neighbor had one of those players that played movies off of discs the size of vinyl records... What were those things even called???
So anyway I don't remember seeing very many of those Beta players. Besides that one perhaps one or two others was all I ever saw. But then again back then not everyone had a movie player. I know we didn't have anything until we'd lived here in Indiana for a while, I'm guessing around 1985 or so was around the time when we got our first VHS VCR player. I'm assuming the war was pretty much over by then.
Today I honestly don't know anyone who doesn't have some sort of movie player in their house. Even most grandparents at least have an old VCR kickin around somewhere. So it's not so much a question of 'do you have a movie player in your home', as much as it is a question of 'which movie player do you have in your home'? So now these format wars induce quite a lot more casualties as far as people going out and wasting their money on a player that will be doomed to becoming obsolete. And there's no real way to be able to tell which will be the victor of the format war until the dust has settled and there's only 1 left standing. So it's a 50/50 crap shoot. Roll the dice and hope for the best.
That's about all we can do.
