Another Format War is Over

After two years of battle between Sony's Blueray and Toshiba's HD-DVD technology, the High Definition format war is finally over.

Now that all 6 major movie studios have backed Blueray, Toshiba has been left with no choice but to discontinue production of the HD-DVD disks. As with the previous format wars (between Betamax and VHS) this is likely to be held up as a case study in business and marketing courses for years to come.

VHS vs Betamax

It seems Sony has learnt a thing or two from the defeat of their Betamax format. I remember finding the VHS/Betamax format war fascinating when I studied it in an Open University course I took a few years ago.

Many factors played a part in the final dominance of VHS, but arguably the main reason for the victory was simply because in the early years, Betamax could only record for 1 hour and VHS could record for 2. Sony failed to do proper market research and wrongly believed that customers would prefer to go for the technically superior Betamax. Sony were also slow to licence their technology to other manufacturers. By the time Sony realised what was happening and reacted to market conditions, it was already too late.

VHS dominated the market by a) producing what the consumer wanted - a cassette capable of recording a full film, and b) enabling large scale production of cheap VHS players.

The Thorn-EMI group backed VHS and flooded their many high-street TV rental shops with low-cost VHS machines. Alternatively, Sony were concentrating on quality, so Betamax became a format to buy while VHS was the format to rent. Unfortunately for Sony, most people preferred to rent at the time, particularly when the simplest machine cost around £700 (equivalent to over £2000 today). This process was then self-reinforcing, because the presence of two formats made people reluctant to commit to one and risk picking the eventual loser - and so they rented and waited to see what would happen. By 1980, out of an estimated 100,000 homes with VCRs, 70% were rented.

Then came the explosion in the early 80's of video tape rental - another factor that led to the demise of Betamax. The Betamax suppliers were slow off the mark, and released less films on the format. As more people bought or rented video players and started to rent tapes, the greater choice was with VHS, which reinforced the reason for customers to purchase VHS players rather than Betamax.

And that was the end of Betamax, with the exception of Japan where the standard remained popular.

Was it Worth It?

Sony has won the HD-DVD battle and people will argue about how they did it for years to come. It wasn't as straight forward as the VHS/Betamax battle. What were the real reasons for the movie studios backing Blueray instead of HD-DVD? The fact that Sony Pictures is one of the major movie studios probably had something to do with it.

The question you've got to ask though, is how relevant is Blueray given the move to downloadable content from the Internet. Itunes, Amazon, Lovefilm and many others are now already offering downloadable movies. High volume disk storage is becoming ridiculously cheap; internet bandwidth is increasing at a tremendous rate; and most DVD players now come with many options, including DIVX - the format of choice for peer-to-peer downloaded content.

Seriously, on-demand video is now a reality. In a few years time the average home will get most of their TV and video content delivered by the Internet, and if we want to store and keep it, we'll save it on a hard drive (or maybe even flash drive). The Writers Guild of America know this, which is one of the reasons for the recent Hollywood writers strike, which ended with the movie studios finally agreeing to pay residuals for online content.

I'm holding out on Blueray for this very reason, unless of course I can talk Rach into agreeing to get a PS3 which comes with a Blueray player. But given we've already got a Wii I don't think that will be an option.

Rambo

I've just returned from watching Rambo at our local flicks.

Growing up with the Rambo films I was looking forward to seeing this final revisit, particularly after seeing, and enjoying, Rocky Balboa, Sly's other throw back to the eighties.

Whereas Rocky Balboa worked well as mainly a character drama; taking a nostalgic trip down memory lane yet at the same time re-generating the excitement of the early Rocky franchise; disappointingly, I found Rambo to be just an over-the-top gore fest with absolutely nothing interesting to say.

Like Rocky Balboa, this film did have a flash-back sequence to try and help explain why Rambo is who he is and why he hasn't returned to America. But any attempt to delve into the character of John Rambo was entirely superficial.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting Citizen Kane. You know what you're going to get when you see a Rambo film. However, if I hadn't have already known that Sly himself had directed this I may have thought that Quentin Tarantino had got his hands on the film, such was the level of sad-masochistic violence. Was there really any need for the camera to linger on scenes of beheadings and mutilation? Funnily enough, I've just had a look on IMDB.com and it actually says if you liked this film you may also enjoy Kill Bill: Vol 1.

The main thing you expect to see in a Rambo film is Rambo himself killing lots of baddies in a hundred different inventive ways - utilising his special forces training. While the body count that he racks up his large, a good proportion of this is down to him spraying the baddies with a large calibre machine gun. Boring! I was hoping to see a lot more hand-to-hand combat and the use of special techniques.

At 91 minutes the film is short. Even though I didn't particularly enjoy it I did feel the film was missing a good 30 minutes of plot. Everything seemed really rushed. When the final credits came up it was a case of 'is that it?'.

If you want to see Rambo my advice is don't. Rent out Tears of the Sun with Bruce Willis instead. It's basically the same film except Tears of the Sun is much better.

The Brisbane Barber Experience

I never thought that getting my hair cut could be such a wonderful experience. Being previously used to a 5 minute cut and quick brush down (which always seemed to leave more hair down the back of my shirt than what went on the floor), the first time I got my hair cut in Australia I was pleasantly surprised when on completion of the cut I was treated to a neck shave with cut-throat blade, followed by a hot towel on my face and neck, a head massage, and finally a small hoover device to clean away any residual hair. As this was a lunchtime haircut I think it was the first time in my life that I'd gone back to work after lunch feeling clean and refreshed. All of this for $22 (roughly ten British pounds).

I've since returned to the barbers in question many times. I'm not sure if this is the standard barber experience in Australia but it's yet another small reason why I love Australia.

Life is Ticking Along

All is quiet in the Haines Brisbane residence at the moment. We haven't been doing much lately as we're saving our money for when my parents come over at the end of March for 4 weeks, in which time we're planning on a week up on the Great Barrier Reef.

Besides that, the weather here is still crap. The locals are describing it as one of the best summers in years - mild with loads of rain. This may seem strange to us poms but knowing how hot it can get here in the summer I can understand the appreciation of a reprieve. The combined dam levels are currently at a whopping 37%, and if they reach 40% there is talk of a lowering of the water restrictions. A couple of weeks ago we had 110mm of rain in less than an hour, resulting in large areas of flooding and even one death - a local teenager tried to surf the flash flood and got his ankle stuck in a drain and subsequently drowned. Apparently it's going to get really hot again in March and we're in for a mild Winter. It only usually gets as low as 18 degrees C here during the day in the Winter anyway so I'm not sure what they mean by mild!

If I'm not depressed enough by the rain then I can always count on my beloved Liverpool FC to depress me even more. What the hell is going on with that team? How can we get knocked out of the FA Cup by Barnsley? The Rafalution is well and truly over. Benitez, you have to go.

On the work front I'm back and forth to Sydney every week at the moment. I don't mind it so much though because I'm clocking up loads of air miles! In fact, I'm trying to get much savvier with my finances. I always fly with Virgin Blue for which I get velocity points (air miles). And to add to this I've now got a credit card for which I get velocity points on purchases. So I now use the credit card for all purchases and set the balance to be paid off in full each month. The NAB (National Australia Bank) credit card comes with two credit cards on the same account - 1 Visa and 1 American Express - and I get double the points if I use the American Express.

It's working out pretty well because using the BPAY system in Australia I can pay most of my household bills using the credit card as well. I've set the maximum balance of the credit card to be roughly the same as my monthly income to counter the risk of not being able to pay off the monthly balance. At the moment I've earned enough velocity points to buy half a tennis racket. So if all goes well I should be able to clock up enough air miles to make it back to the UK roughly some time in 2025!

Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down

Why not have a nice cup of tea and a sit down :-)

Back in Sydney Again

Back in Sydney again. I decided to stay in a serviced apartment again this time (as I did the week before xmas), however it’s a pleasure to discover that these Meriton apartments are much nicer, more conveniently located, yet roughly the same price as the Medina Executive Apartments I stayed in last time. It’s only a studio apartment but it’s twice the size of the one I stayed in at the Medina.

It was a bit of a nightmare getting here though. It started when I did the web check-in before I flew. I didn’t realize until I got to the airport but the boarding pass that I printed off had bumped me to a slightly later flight. And then when I reached the airport, I couldn’t find the flight on the departure boards. The Virgin Blue desk then informed me that the flight that I’d been bumped to had been cancelled, so I was bumped again to a later flight. Finally when I was in the air, the flight itself suffered from a lot of turbulence. At one point it seemed to drop out of the air for 3 seconds, which briefly left my stomach in my throat, and the landing was one of the heaviest I’ve ever experienced. We bounced so hard I thought we were going to bounce completely off the runway! To top it off, when we arrived at the arrival gate, somehow, the air bridge connecting the terminal gate to the airplane became stuck to the aircraft in the wrong position and it took 20 minutes for them to disengage and realign it properly before we could disembark. What a nightmare.

Sydney is having the same weather has Brisbane by the looks of it. Warm but very wet. It amazes me to see the amount of people walking about in flip-flops, or ‘thongs’ as they call them over here, even though it’s been raining pretty much non-stop for the last week. Aren’t they worried about trench foot?

One consequence of all this rain we’re having is that it seems to result in a lot of insects trying to take shelter in our house. Last week the largest spider I have ever seen in my life outside of a zoo scuttled across our living room floor and frightened the life out of us. Honestly, I didn’t think I had a phobia of spiders until I saw that thing. I quickly went to get a glass to put it out before realising that we didn’t possess a glass big enough. I then tried a Tupperware box but I couldn’t catch it, it was too fast for me. I suggested to Rach that we just splatter it but she was having none of it. Not because she didn’t want to harm it. She was worried about the mess it would make, which was fair enough because it would have been a large splatter! In the end I ended up using the hoover attachment to suck it up. How the hell do they get in that’s what I want to know. We’re supposed to have full mesh screening on all windows and doors to stop even the smallest mosquito. They’re sneaky little critters!