PS3 Informer

Five Reasons Blu-ray is a Success for Sony

Back before the launch of the Playstation 3 console in 2006, life must have been stressful around the Sony headquarters in Tokyo. Its major competitor, Microsoft, had beaten the Japanese company to the punch and released its Xbox successor a full year before Sony would be able to get its own console out the door. Even more worrying, Microsoft's offering was nearly the opposite of what Sony had planned - it used relatively inexpensive off-the-shelf parts, contained a standard DVD drive, and forced consumers to buy modular peripherals as add-ons, a business model many believed had died with the Sega 32X. By contrast, the PS3 was self-contained, fully equipped, and expensive. At the root of both its delay on the market and its high price was the revolutionary new storage system, Blu-ray.

Somebody inside the company must have been concerned that Ken Kutaragi's ambitious plans to make the Playstation 3 the Trojan horse for a new optical format were ill-conceived. Would consumers do as he said and seek out second jobs to afford the pricey media player, or would the experiment in disaster? Luckily for Sony, nearly three years after the launch of the Playstation 3 and the replacement of Kutaragi at the head of Sony Computer Entertainment, his design has been vindicated: although it was risky, Sony's Blu-ray strategy has turned out to be a success. Here are five reasons why.

5) The technology is really, really cool
Blu-ray discs use a shorter wavelength 405 nm blue laser to read information that can be more tightly-packed on the surface. As a result, a dual-layer Blu-ray disc can hold about 50 GB of data, roughly six times that of a regular DVD. This enables the media to store uncompressed video, audio, and texture data that can be displayed in true high definition resolutions. A standard DVD displays video in only 720x480 resolution, while a Blu-ray disc will display pictures with 1920x1080 pixels. The difference in picture quality is not remarkable, but it is noticeable even to an untrained eye when viewed on a large HD display. Blu-ray discs are also scratch resistant, featuring a special hardened coating developed by TDK.

A smaller laser reads more data from a single-layer Blu-ray disc than older formats that relied on wider beams.

4) Digital distribution is lagging
Perhaps the biggest threat to the success of Sony's Blu-ray disc format is not a disc at all - it is the rise in popularity of digital downloads and internet streaming of video content. Despite this, there are a number of important ways in which digital downloads lag behind Blu-ray in terms of quality and convenience, and will likely continue to do so for years to come. Firstly, consumers are not fully convinced that downloading a movie to their hard drive is the same thing as actually owning a copy on disc. Secondly, bandwidth remains expensive, and users pay a premium for HD downloadable content that is still not even as high fidelity as a Blu-ray recording. There will be several more years before digital distribution can catch up to the level of quality offered by optical discs.

3) We Really DO need all that space
Some critics have wondered whether we really need all that space, when the 9 GB of data contained on a DVD seems to be working just fine for most games. The answer, as any true technophile will avow, is "of course we do". Just this week, the founder of Epic Games hypothesized that photo-realistic graphics will be available to video game makers within the decade. All of that graphical fidelity is going to need to be stored somewhere. It could be that the current 50 GB Blu-ray disc is not sufficient to contain all the information that will be needed for these games. No matter: a prototype quad-layer setup boosts the storage capacity of a single disc to 100 GB. Even current-gen games are starting to push up against the 9 GB DVD barrier. Rage developer John Carmack has been mumbling for years about the possible need to ship the Xbox version of the open-world game on two separate discs. Rumor has it that Rage might even be moved to the PS3 as an exclusive, and we expect to hear more about that possible bombshell at E3 next week.

2) The Trojan horse strategy worked
In an alternate universe, where Sony engineers decided that crazy Ken Kutaragi was indeed crazy and decided not to include the expensive Blu-ray drive in the company's flagship video game console, things could have gone very differently. Marketing data suggests that it was precisely the PS3 as a Trojan horse that made all the difference for the success of Blu-ray. Late to market and expensive, Sony initially had a difficult time convincing consumers of the merits of its optical technology. But when the heavily subsidized PS3 console came on the market in late 2006, it made all the difference to the installed base of Blu-ray players, tilting the marketshare critically in Sony's direction. When the HD DVD coalition capitulated in 2008, it left Sony and its partners as the sole players in the current optical format war, a victory that was hard-fought and well-deserved.

1) The Strongest PS3 Feature
In an era of multiplatform game releases, where fanboys quibble over obtuse pixel-counts and framerates, it is difficult for a rational consumer to really find clear differences between the experience offered on the Xbox 360 and the PS3. One area where Sony can differentiate its software offerings from competitors, however, is with exclusive releases that take full advantage of its hardware. One very clear advantage of the Playstation 3, it turns out, is not its Cell processor or graphics chip, but the huge storage capacity enabled by Blu-ray disc. Sure, it is unrealistic for most games to stream data from the drive, and many require a mandatory install to the hard drive, but the 50GB storage media enables developers to offer larger, more detailed, and less-compressed virtual worlds for players to explore. It may well turn out to be Blu-ray, and not the much-vaunted Cell, that carries Sony's Playstation 3 all the way to the end of its 10-year life cycle.

Blu-ray discs line the shelves at a popular electronics retailer.