Format war

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A format war describes competition between competing, and typically mutually incompatible, media formats, usually very costly to the format-owning parties involved. It results from a failure to agree on a technical standard. Perhaps the most famous example was the videotape format war of the late 1970s and early 1980s, between the rival VHS and Betamax Videotape formats.

An ironic aspect of format wars is that perceived technical superiority does not always win. Though Betamax was perceived by consumers to have better picture quality than VHS, a number of factors including VHS's longer recording time, wider range of models and suppliers, and lower cost relegated Beta to a professional production role in a slightly redesigned version called Betacam. Betacam uses the same physical cassette as Betamax, but records the video to the tape in component format (as opposed to Betamax's composite). Betacam also uses a faster linear tape speed.

Some notable examples of format wars include:

[edit] 1940s

Vinyl record formats: Columbia Records' 12-inch (30 cm) Long Play (LP) 33⅓ rpm microgroove record versus RCA Victor's 7-inch (17.5 cm) / 45 rpm Extended Play (EP) during the years 1948–1950. Ended in a compromise because each format found a separate marketing niche, and record players were redesigned to use either type. Both formats nearly disappeared with the rise of the compact disc, though vinyl records are still used by niche audiences such as disk jockeys and audiophiles.

[edit] 1960s

Portable audio tape formats: 8-track and four-track cartridges versus Compact audio cassette. While notably successful into the mid-to-late 1970s, the 8-track eventually lost due to technical limitations, including variable audio quality and lack of fine control.
Color TV broadcast formats: PAL and SECAM. In 1965, the European countries failed to agree on one common format for broadcasting color TV. Even though they all agreed on the 625-line 50 half-frames/sec format (making the British 405-line and the French 819-line formats obsolete), they failed to agree on how to encode the color. Germany developed the PAL system, which became the standard in most of Western Europe. France, however, developed its own SECAM system, involving Soviet scientists in the development, and it was consequently adopted in the Eastern bloc. In the long run, PAL has been more popular (several SECAM countries, especially in Eastern Europe, switched to PAL), and most "SECAM" devices are PAL devices that support SECAM. Key to this is the fact that SECAM video is not easy to edit and cannot be mixed; much SECAM production is done in PAL, component video, or digital video before being output to an analog SECAM signal.

[edit] 1970s

VHS vs. Betamax vs. Video 2000, the Videotape format war, see top of this article.

[edit] 1980s

Video8 vs. VHS-C and later Hi8 vs. S-VHS-C in the domain of camcorder tape formats. This is somewhat an extension on the VHS vs. Betacam fight, but here, Video8 and Hi8 got some widespread acceptance for several years, until MiniDV replaced both sides of the standard.
AM stereo was capable of fidelity equivalent to FM but was doomed in the USA by competing formats during the 1980s with Motorola's C-QUAM competing vigorously with four other incompatible formats including those by Magnavox, Kahn/Haseltine, and Harris. It is still widely used in Japan, and sees sporadic use by broadcast stations in the United States despite the lack of consumer equipment to support it.

[edit] 1990s

MiniDisc by Sony vs. Digital Compact Cassette ("DCC") by Philips, won by MiniDisc in the mid 1990s, although the preceding format war made consumers very cautious and neither format ever achieved widespread popularity in the West.
X2 vs K56flex — these predecessors to the V.90 and V.92 modem protocols engaged in a brief fight for market dominance until V.90 (based on K56flex, but not identical) was developed in 1999. For some time, online providers needed to maintain two modem banks to provide dial-up access for both technologies.
Digital audio data compression formats: MP3 versus Ogg Vorbis versus Advanced Audio Coding versus Windows Media Audio. As with digital video, the competing formats can be played on the same equipment (with the exception of some mobile players). Each format has found its own niche— while MP3 is the de facto standard for audio encoding, WMA and AAC are favored by commercial music distributors, and Vorbis has found its strongest use among game developers and the like who have need for a high-quality audio codec but do not want to pay the licensing fees attached to other codecs.
Digital video format: MultiMedia Compact Disc (MMCD), backed by Philips and Sony, versus the Super Density disc (SD), supported by Toshiba, Time Warner, Matsushita Electric, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Pioneer, Thomson, and JVC. Despite heated industry and trade-show battles, neither product made it to market, as a commercial format war was averted by the development of the joint DVD standard, based largely on the SD specifications.
Digital video formats: DVD versus DIVX. DIVX was similar to DVD but included pay per view features. DIVX players could play DVDs, but standard DVD players couldn't play DIVX disks. Several Hollywood studios (Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount Pictures) initially released their movies exclusively in the DIVX format. (Note that DIVX should not be confused with DivX).
Digital video data compression formats: Windows Media Video versus RealVideo versus DivX versus QuickTime. While in theory, all formats work equally well on most major operating systems like Microsoft Windows, which makes the stakes for the consumer considerably lower, support for WMV, based on ASF, does not come with free software operating systems and players due to legal issues. According to the popular video codec site Doom9, DivX boasts the highest quality versus compression rate of those already mentioned, while it is beaten by XviD, which is bested by x264.
Memory cards "five-way brawl": CompactFlash vs. Memory Stick vs. MultiMediaCard / Secure Digital card vs. SmartMedia vs. XD-Picture Card.
Hi-fi digital audio discs: DVD-Audio versus SACD. These two formats are likely to coexist due to newer players that handle both formats with equal ease, though neither has caught on with the market at the moment. Indeed, by far the fastest-growing music formats today are lossy compressed formats.

[edit] 2000s

Recordable DVD formats: DVD+R versus DVD-R, and originally DVD-RAM. Ultimately this has become a non-issue, as most new DVD recorders support both formats and are referred to as DVD±R.
High-definition optical disc formats: Blu-ray Disc versus HD DVD. This battle may just be the most known format war since Betamax vs. VHS. Blu-Ray Discs are backed largly by Sony and Apple Computers (as well as many other well known companies), and HD-DVD by Toshiba and Microsoft. In 2006, players supporting both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have been released. While these players are home theater computers, they do exist. No announcements have been made by any of the major electronics manufacturers to make a stand alone unit that plays both formats, as of December 2006.
Ultra-wideband networking technology — in early 2006, an IEEE standards working group disbanded because two factions could not agree on a single standard for a successor to Wi-Fi. (WiMedia Alliance, IEEE 802.15, WirelessHD)