Why Blue Ray had HD-DVD Beat From the Start

The name.

Sure, plenty of people talk about the pros and cons of each format- storage, reliability, etc. It's all moot. Blue ray has got the better branding. It's quite simple:

Saying "HD-DVD" kind of sounds like saying "DVD plus." Who wants to pay hundreds of dollars for that marginal improvement? Not me. Enter mysterious super-cool sounding Blue-Ray. You'd think this amazing brand new thing was played by a laser or something. Multiply that by the thousands of poorly-informed early-adopters with disposable cash (who decide the outcome of format wars), and you have a contest over before it even began.

Also, there is the inevitable abbreviation. Admit it, there was a day when you wasted that syllable saying "compact disc" instead of "CD." The abbreviation for HD-DVD would be "HD", but that's too confusing. If I say "I have that movie on HD," am I saying that I have it on this particular kind of spinning disc, on my computer at high resolution, or perhaps Tivo'd ? Who knows.

All that said, Blue-ray really is the better format; capacity is king. I on the other hand, am trying to boycott spinning discs altogether. The only reason we're still storing data this way is for copyright protection, if you think about it.