Business As Usual: The Upcoming Video Format War

My pals at Gizmodo today have a thoughtful feature/editorial/rant about a looming threat to computer users' sanity: The rapid proliferation of digital video formats. Set top boxes like Apple TV and TiVo support some of them, but not all. And that's the real problem here: Unlike audio, which standardized early on MP3 and which has rebuffed nearly all attempts to upgrade it, video has a mammoth pile of poorly-understood standards, none of which has a critical mass.

It's inevitable that physical media will eventually disappear for both audio and video, but then what happens? We're stuck with this mess of video standards that we currently have, plus whatever emerges before now and then.

But is that so bad?

I likewise bemoan the standards issue (and I too am regularly stymied by equipment that won't play video files I feel to be relatively standard), but I'm a little more optimistic that this will get worked out in the end. While Gizmodo sees the situation getting worse, I have a hunch it will get better, and soon.

We're in a period of real market flux right now. Companies are figuring out what works and what doesn't, and where the tolerance levels are for new standards. A lot of that has to do with DRM: Video DRM restrictions are far, far worse than audio ones, and workarounds are much more convoluted.

But support for DRM is massively flagging, and I think that within five years it will be a thing of the past. It's vanishing already on audio, and consumers have pretty widely rejected it on the video front.

Will a champion emerge from the current rubble of standards? It already is, in my mind: DivX, a once-scrappy format that is now seeing broad support on mainstream hardware like DVD players, is the standard to beat. Why isn't Apple TV the megahit people thought it would be? One reason: No DivX support.

I don't have all the answers, and I can't see the future, but Gizmodo neglects one key point: We as consumers are in control of where this market goes, and we don't have to shell out $300 for junk like Apple TV or Amazon Unbox if it doesn't meet our needs, no matter how shiny it is. And while a small subset of the wired set eats this stuff up, consumers have largely rejected many of these devices already.

Vote with your dollars, people. Support the standards you want to succeed, and shun DRM and closed boxes that just don't cut the mustard. Believe me, there's plenty of junk out there.