HDTV or high definition televisions are finally entering the arena where it can be considered mainstream. Literally every single day we see that the prices on high definition television sets are falling or even dropping. Luckily the available supporting technology like the digital video recorders has no problem handling HDTV programs.

Today, in at totally different industry, we see that the video game systems are using the advantage that high definition technology provides. And as a bonus we are seeing that more and more channels become available in the HDTV format now than ever before in the history of the technology.

While all of this is considered good news in the of the high definition television market a few of the giant technology companies are fighting a format war in the market for the HD digital video disc. As in the old days with the Beta-max vs. VHS format war there are now two opposing formats that both utilize the blue laser technology in order to encode enough data for a full length movie in high definition. And on top of that there are the bonus features and materials that are added onto a disc that's the same size as a normal DVD. The challenge is that most of the available players of today are only supporting one format and therefore won't play discs in the other format. You can say that the formats are incompatible.

Consumers avoiding the Beta-max failure

Due to this conflict there is currently a lot of trouble in regards to the widespread adoption of just one of the formats. Consumers can easily remember the last time there was a format war and where many people got stuck with a bunch of useless Beta-max cassette players and tapes. Therefore we are now seeing consumers being more cautious and are therefore holding out to see which of the two formats that comes out on top before investing into new technology.

The technical specifications of the two formats are pretty close to being equal, but the Blu-ray disc format from Sony is the winner in terms of the amount of data that it can store. On a disc from Sony you can store up to fifty gigabytes or as much as twenty five gigabytes on each side of the disc. On the other side you have rival of Toshiba with their HD-DVD format. It can only store fifteen gigabytes per side for a total of thirty, but it has the advantage in terms of players being sold about half the price of Blu-ray disc players.

Due to the fact that the Blu-ray format can store the most data, it would seem obvious that it would be the winner on purely technical grounds. However time has shown us that the market for these things isn't quite that simple. In order to win the battle both Sony and Toshiba are trying to win by making their technology more attractive than the other's which in the end will only benifit the consumers.

To make the picture complete one must know that there are some really big names in the electronics, software, and movies industry have gotten behind each of the two formats. On one side the huge company of Microsoft favors HD-DVD and offers an HD-DVD drive that attaches to its popular Xbox 360 gaming system

On the other side there are the major movie studios like 20th Century Fox that are currently releasing a lot of movies on Blu-ray disc while yet other movie companies are releasing movies on HD-DVD. Some of the major film producers are going the safe route and are releasing movies in both formats just to hedge their bets.

So when it looks like high definition television is ready to become mainstream the DVD format war is becoming more and more ugly every day and at this point it doesn't seem like there will be found any solution in the near future.

Once upon a time the cable TV has the first choice for watching TV shows as it was supreme to any other technology on the market at the time. Cable TV was spread out into homes all over the country. It had many advantages of which providing a wide selection of channels and doing it through air and without any affect caused by atmospheric disturbances.

They're doing something else. Paying for a specific program to have it run in the background would be ridiculous.

Sure the technology wasn't a hundred percent perfect and even at the time there were other ways of getting TV into the common homes. Some of these were "over the air broadcasting", satellite TV and video cassettes, but for TV watching populace (or the majority of them), cable TV had the right balance of practicality, cost and variety of programs and shows.

In the beginning of the 1990s there was a giant advance in satellite TV technology and all of a sudden it became cheap enough to have the ordinary people subscribe to hundreds of channels without having the break the bank. This instantly removed the ten foot antennae that a lot of people had planted in both the front- and backyards. Even the people living in the country side (where the cables didn't run and where "over the air broadcasts" couldn't reach) could now afford the same TV options as everyone else. How it when on is still a mystery, but somehow the concept of cable TV managed to survive the new satellite outburst. It has actually, with great effort, started to make something of a rebound as you read these lines. It'll be interesting to see how it is going to unfold.

Today's Biggest Threat


Today the biggest threat to both cable TV and satellite TV is the increasing capacity to transmit video over the Internet. The spread of computers in every home (and most homes have more that one computer already) and the increasing prevalence of high speed Internet connections has made people turn more and more to this solution. The average human spend hours behind the computer every day and the companies behind the technology are quite to take advantage of that. If they could just keep people a little longer that would mean more money for them.

So they reason for the advance in computer technology is simple and we can see that it is constantly getting better at processing the massive amounts of information that go along with broadcasting and streaming both video and music.

Get a Share of the Trend


More and more companies are positioning themselves to get their share of the trend. They do so by offering programs that can be instantly downloaded for free from their websites. To take an example, the company Starz (big movie provider) has put number of movies on their website to be freely downloaded and they are not the only ones that have thought of that idea.

You will even find companies that aren't into the TV industry and has no channels (e.g. AOL) that are still creating huge archives of older sporting events, music videos and TV shows and making them available to the broad audience online.

If you are wondering why all of this is a threat to satellite TV and cable TV providers, it is because the technology provides another option for people to watch their favorite TV shows and movies, which will largely cut them out of the grand picture. The TV people fear that if anyone can download any TV show that they want in order to watch it when they feel like it, then they won't bother to subscribe to a TV service. It might seem a little extreme but the companies are "better safe than sorry".

It might not end up in as bad a scenario as the cable companies prepare for and one major reason is that a lot of people like having the TV on simply as background noise while tus to most people.