The intro to the most recent episode of the Totally Rad Show made me think about competing technology. Growing up, I had an uncle that fancied himself a home theater enthusiast. He always had the newest TV/entertainment related gadgets. My dad trusted him, almost implicitly, when it came to technology. He had a Betamax VCR, and therefore so did we. My parents are very much collectors, so they owned a large number of Beta tapes. In fact they actively watched those tapes up until their Betamax VCR broke down a few years ago. My dad also got suckered into the RCA video disc player, At some point, I need to get my hands on the Video Disc copy of Star Wars from their collection. I still remember when your local (i.e. non chain) video store carried most movies in both formats. We even had a local store that carried the Video Discs. My favorite memory was mom renting something, only to find out that the disc had been swapped for Death Race 2000, which remains, to this day, one of my favorite movies.
I am embarrassed to say that I have carried on the baton of picking the wrong format. I purchased an HD-DVD drive for the 360 just over a month before CES 2008, where the format was officially put to rest. I don’t think there is any way to avoid making the wrong choice, if you make a choice. Suffice to say, if there are two competing formats, and you don’t want to choose the wrong one, you have to wait for the war to end, even if you think you know which one is going to win before hand. The reason I purchased the HD-DVD drive was that I was convinced that it was the better format, and had the best chance of winning.