Travel has gotten in the way of my promised blog post on the "ODF, CDF, and Character Assassination," but in the meantime I’ve been having an interesting conversation with reader Yoon Kit on my previous post (referenced here by Peter Galli in ZDNet). Yoon questioned my assertion that, "Any policy that mandates a single document format for an entire government will inevitably limit the flexibility, choices, and ability to achieve the government goals over the long term, regardless of whether it is ODF, OpenXML, .DOC, or RTF."

He argued that:

"the ultimate goal, for the benefit of small businesses is to have a single file format which everybody can implement and compete on….

"Consider the DVD you purchased. It is a single format. By ‘locking into’ this single format, you create flexibility in applications: I can purchase from Sony, Panasonic, JVC or any other vendor which provides the application to play the DVD standard…"

His comment got me thinking about the format wars in the video industry and how they can be instructive for the debate over document formats. After some pondering and a little research, I realized that the history of video recording technology is a great example of why mandating a single format for everyone is dangerous for innovation and meeting the needs of an incredibly diverse population.

To illustrate, let’s take a quick look back at the video recording industry over the past 30 years. 

VHS vs Betamax –During the 1970s and 1980s, the JVC’s VHS and Sony’s Betamax formats were battling for supremacy in the video cassette recorder industry. After years of toiling, it was VHS that prevailed in the consumer market, capturing a majority of the market share and forcing Sony to eventually license the technology for its own video cassette recorders.

The big question was, "Why?"

There were many differences in the technologies, but it essentially boiled down to this: Betamax offered users better resolution or quality of picture and sound. VHS tapes were cheaper and had longer run times. As Wikipedia explains:

What Sony didn’t take into account was what the consumers wanted. Sony believed that having better quality recordings was the key to success, whereas it soon became clear that consumer desire was focused more intently on recording time and compatibility for easy transfer of information.

The majority of the consumer market prioritized recording time and compatibility over the quality of recordings. VHS won in the consumer market. End of story, right? Not so fast.

Betamax did not really die; it evolved. It evolved into what is now known as Betacam and has been the standard for professional television production for the better part of 20 years. Why? Because professional production crews demanded quality above length of tape. They had different priorities than average consumers.

Despite the myth that VHS killed Betamax, the reality is that both standards went on in the marketplace to serve its different needs.

The Many Standards of the DVD – Yoon argued that the DVD is a great example of a single format that created flexibility in applications but there are some serious problems with his argument.

  1. The ONLY Part of the DVD that is a "Single Format" is the Physical Media Itself. While the physical media of a DVD is built to single standard, DVDs can carry any kind of digital information in virtually any type of standard format. Digital Video, Audio, Photo or even Document Formats can all be carried and viewed via DVDs. In physical media, there is actually a stronger case for standardizing on a single format because it can dramatically lower production costs. Despite this powerful benefit, however, it would be ludicrous to suggest that all alternative development projects should stop. If that were the case, we would still be trying to figure out how to encode digital surround sound onto wax tubes.
  2. Even the DVD Video Standard is Not a Single Standard – I assume that Yoon probably meant the commercial DVD-Video standard in his comment, but even that is not really a single standard. The DVDs you buy from Best Buy are encoded using a combination of the MPEG-2 standard for video and audio in varying formats including PCM, DTS, MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (MP2), or Dolby Digital (AC-3). So, even Sony has choices on what audio standard to use when it releases its next movie to the ‘single format’ DVD. 
  3. Even Standalone DVD Players Play MULTIPLE Standards – Leaving DVD-equipped computers out of the mix, stand-alone DVD players usually support more than JUST the "DVD standard." Many will play several video standards (DVD, DivX, and WMV), audio standards (CD, HDCD, MPG, WMA, etc.), and even image standards (JPEG, GIF, etc.). Because they are able to embrace multiple standards, these companies are able to create truly innovative products. Most even play different types of physical media, including CDs, DVD-Rs, etc. The fact that multiple standards exist hasn’t HARMED small firms, in fact it has provided a new way for them to differentiate themselves from larger rivals. If there was just a single DVD format on which to implement and compete, the ability of those companies implementing the standard to innovate would be limited primarily to price, speed, user interface, and other tweaks around the edges.

HD-DVD vs. BluRay – The rapid growth in the market for High Definition television sets has fueled demand for HD content that takes advantage of all those extra pixels. DVD Video does not support high definition resolutions like 1080p, 1080i, or 720p. The standard tops out at 720×480 and DVDs themselves are simply incapable of carrying enough information for an entire HD movie.

In order to meet the immediate demands, DVD player manufacturers got creative and tried to innovate around the fundamental limitations of the standard. By using upscaling technology, these DVD players are able to match the pixel count of the signal to the physical pixel count on a HD television and creating the illusion of better detail and color accuracy. While these companies were able to create the illusion of HD content (to varying degrees) from DVDs, it wasn’t true HD.

In order to deliver that, they needed a new technology, a new form of physical media, and a new format. The result is a new format war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs. Again both technologies have their advantages and disadvantages. Blu-ray currently has the lead in disc capacity, but HD DVD offers better interactivity and requires better quality audio and video support.

Additionally, both technologies support multiple standards for video and audio compression to give flexibility to users.

In Part II, I’ll summarize what all this means for the document format debate.