Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? Well, it's time for a tech stuff tidbits. This one will probably be a long one, like a lot of mine. I get it. I'm bad at being brief, but I thought I would talk a little bit about format wars, which I've talked about before, but uh, it was one of those that I really wanted to kind of talk about to explain what we mean when we say format war and what that can imply. And the older you are, the more format wars you have likely witnessed firsthand. Like I can think of a handful that I've seen, but of course there are plenty that we're way before my time. So what is a format war? Why can they be really bad, particular for consumers? And what are a few examples. That's what we're gonna look at today, But first let's define it. So a format war essentially is when you've got two similar technologies, so they each accomplish the same thing, or at least a very similar outcome. They're both meant to provide for the same purpose, they might do it in very different ways. In fact, frequently they do approach this in extremely different ways. And typically these two different or more. Sometimes it's more than just two. But these different technologies are incompatible with one another. So they're each meant to achieve a certain goal, but they can't work together because they're doing it in a fundamentally different way or sometimes a subtly different way, but a way that's different enough that they can't work together. So, in other words, if you buy technology A, then you aren't really able to use the stuff for technology B on it. Like we see this very easily and stuff like consoles, right, we think of the console wars where you have an Xbox or a PlayStation or a Nintendo. Well, you can't play PlayStation games on an Xbox, you can't play Xbox games on a Nintendo, and so forth right, you can get the titles for those particular consoles, but you can't put an Xbox you know, disk in a PlayStation console. It won't work. I mean you could do it, it just wouldn't work. Now. One way you could get around that is if you buy all the consoles. Right, So if you have a Tech A and a Tech B. The one way you could get around being limited is you could also buy tech B. But then you're spending way more cash. And ain't all of us got that kind of cheddar? You know what I'm saying. I am not the kind of person who can buy every format just so that way I have access to everything. And you know, we really do see this today played out in other ways, like the different streaming services I would argue are kind of a format war. Um, it's more of a streaming war because the format is pretty much the same. It's not like, you know, if you have uh one type of streaming device versus another, that you're limited to specific types of streaming content. But otherwise it's very similar in that if you want access to everything, you gotta subscribe to everything, which is pretty frustrating as a consumer. So the reason format wars tend to be bad for consumers is that we're faced with really tough choices. If we want whatever the technology actually does, then we then have to decide which option do we go with. Do we go with tech A or do we go with tech B. We do that knowing that our choice is going to lock us in from that point forward into that technologies ecosystem again unless we go crazy and buy all of them. So if we do that, if we're buying a specific one, we say, all right, I've looked at both tech A and tech B really for a long time. I have ultimately decided that Tech A is the one that I like more, so I'm gonna go with that. Um. But we do that knowing that we're gonna miss out on anything that was made explicitly and exclusively for Tech B. And likewise, if we had made the other choice, we'd be facing the same situation, just in reverse. So you can go with a road less traveled and it will make all the difference. But different does not mean better. It doesn't mean worse either. It means different, and you might feel reluctant to get on board in the first place early on in a format war, because sometimes formats go obsolete. In several of the examples that will talk about in this episode, one or more formats would ultimately fall to a different one that would survive, and obviously that means that anyone who has backed a failed format is left with a piece of technology that becomes increasingly irrelevant and ultimately obsolete. Meanwhile, if you want to stay up to speed, you have to bite the bullet and buy the other format. Either that or you just you know, wash your hands the whole thing and walk away from technology and live out in the woods, which, trust me, I have been tempted to do on numerous occasions. Now, if this happens to you once or twice, where you back a format and the format ultimately fails, you might end up being a little gun shy around emerging formats. You might then have a philosophy of this looks really cool. There are two different versions of this thing, and they're fighting each other. I'm just gonna wait and see how this shakes out before I jump on board. Right you, you've been bitten too many times. There are early adopters who who just live for this stuff and they go out and they'll buy every new thing as it comes out. Um, I don't know where they're getting their money from. It is not the same place where I get my money from, because they don't let me get that kind of money. So in that case, you might feel like a wait and see approach is better. And honestly, this is sort of what I typically do, although I do occasionally fall victim to getting hyped because you have to suppress the evil feeling of fomo, you know, the fear of missing out, particularly as you see other folks really enjoying their technology while you just sort of sit and wait. I'm kind of imagining now people playing video games while writing jet skis and flying over waves or something. Now, one thing that can happen with format wars is that the industry as a whole sometimes will coalesce around a unified standard. And it is best for the consumer anyway when this happens before products ever come to market, because at that point, customers have the option to buy whichever brand of the technology they like, and they know it should work with pretty much anything else made for that specific use case. So, in other words, like there are times where companies will all be developing a technology that's meant to do something similar, and the companies, well, then behind closed doors essentially meet with one another, hash it out, make compromises, and create a more unified technology before they come to market. So then when you go to the store, you're like, all right, well, there's brand A version of this, there's Brand B version of this, there's Brand C, version of this, but they all do the same thing, and the stuff that's made for them will work on the other ones. That's ideal for customers. Doesn't always happen that way, but we have seen that happen a few times. UH, Like the Compact Disc. While it did have competitive competing formats, the Compact disc was not like by itself, but the Compact Disc benefited because that was it was the product of that kind of compromise before it came to market, and that ultimately meant that consumers had fewer incompatible formats in front of them in order to uh to enjoy that technology. So it does happen, but um often we won't see agreement in an industry on a particular standard until after different formats have already hit the marketing. But then, of course it's too late. At least some portion of the consumer public will be left behind if ultimately everyone then agrees upon a standard. All right, Well, let's talk about a few famous format wars. And there's quite a few of them. There have been dozens of them. I'm gonna stick with some that aren't very obscure, Like I'm gonna stick with some well known ones just for the purposes of kind of explaining what was going on, and a lot of them will relate to technology and various forms of media, because that's one realm. Whereas consumers, we have seen format wars, you know, front and center, like those tend to be the most uh published or publicized format wars in our era and uh And when I'm talking about media, I'm really talking about any content that plays upon technology. It could be media in the form of music, it could be shows and movies or or whatever, or it could be software. So that's kind of what I mean when I say media. But one format that I've talked about a format war that I covered in past episodes. I also talked about this when I I appeared as the Quizster on Ridiculous History. If you've never listened to Ridiculous History, you should check it out. It's a very fun show and once in a rare while I'll pop on as a ridiculous, over the top villain called the Quister. But there was one episode where I showed up and talked about rail gauges, as in railroad tracks, you know what trains travel upon. In the very early days of railroads, you had different engineers and different companies that were building train engines and cars or rather like bogeis or trucks as they're sometimes called. These are the wheeled frames that sit on the rails and then you essentially bolt cars onto these frames. Well, the were a lot of people making these, and they were making them at different sizes, Like they had designed the tracks and the the trains uh to run on a specific width of rails, and they weren't all the same everywhere. So this is just a random, like hypothetical example. You could have a region within a country where one part of the region there's, uh, there's a company that's laying down tracks that are a hundred centimeters apart because the wheels on their vehicles are a hundred centimeters apart. But elsewhere in that same region, you might have folks building other trains where they've settled on a width that's a hundred twenty centimeters apart. And so you can't have a train that was built for one run on the tracks of the other, right, because you know, if a train were to encounter a section of track where suddenly there was a twenty centimeter difference in the width apart from the rails, the train's gonna go flying off the track it you know, the wheels can't expand with it. So this obviously was a limiting factor. So as people were building train tracks, they eventually arrived at locations where other tracks were also being built at a different width, and that meant there was no way for a train to pass from one set to another, and if you really wanted to travel long distance, chances are you would have to change trains, perhaps a few times in different towns. In fact, there was one town in Pennsylvania where this became a cornerstone of their local economy. They counted on the fact that you had different rail gauges all terminating at this one town because it would mean that trains would have to stop in that town, and then the locals often found employment by doing stuff that was related to the fact people were stopped in the town in order to change trains. So there were people who made money as as porters who were unlow trains or loading other trains. You had a lot of people who are making money because they were providing food or lodging or both two travelers. So when you had government saying, you know, it would make way more sense for us to settle on a standard rail gage so that you could travel seamlessly from point A to point B without having these issues. Towns like this one in Pennsylvania really objected to that, and by objected, I mean like they were. They got a little rowdy, they started tearing up train tracks. That's how bad this format war was going. Because they saw it as their livelihood and if you were too streamline things, it might be better for the passengers, but it wouldn't be better for this town. So this was a format war where depending upon what side you were on, like what where you were coming from, if you were coming from the perspective of a traveler or you were coming from the perspective of a townsperson who is dependent upon this for their living, you had a very different view on what was important. Now. Ultimately, at least in most cases, UH standards were arrived at and the train gauge was set to a specific width. UH. There are still trains in countries even like the United States that have a different rail gauge, but they tend to be curiosities now. They're like tourist attractions UM and typically are not really used that much in industry these days. So you can. You can sometimes find these in interesting places where you know people have maintained the tracks and the systems so that you can experience it. But if you're traveling coast to coast, then you're on standardized rail gauge. So that was a format work that was long in the making and took a long time to resolve and didn't go easily. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break here, but when we come back, we'll talk about some more format wars. Okay, let's get back to it. So another really big and important format war, particularly here in the United States back in the day, like like late eighteen hundreds into the nineteen hundreds, was alternating current versus direct current. So here in the US, that war was really personified as Thomas Edison on the direct current side versus George Westinghouse on the alternating current side. Though some people will substitute George Westinghouse. They'll they'll put in Nicola Tesla instead, and it becomes Tesla versus Edison. That's not really an accurate description because Edison was really more of a business owner as was Westinghouse, and Tesla was more of an engineer. Um. But we often see it Edison versus Tesla's really Edison versus Westinghouse. And anyway, Westinghouson and Tesla were on the alternating current side. There were numerous promotional stunts that both sides held in an effort to have their own standard adopted for the purposes of building out infrastructure throughout the United States. I mean this was like, this was representing a true fortune in investments right in order to build out power plants and all the wiring and everything that would be needed in order to transmit power to the average American citizen. It is hard to put a figure on how big a a fortune that was a potential fortune. So clearly the stakes were very high between d C and a C, and they each had their own uh benefits and drawbacks, but ultimately a C would win out like they were. And again there were some huge promotional battles. A big one was when Westinghouse managed to to land the contract for the World's Fair to light the World's Fair. But and of course there's there's stories that have grown with the retelling, such as the the electrocution of an elephant named Topsy using alternating current um, which was frequently attributed to Edison in recent years, but really it was more like Edison's company that did this. And the story gets really complex. It's still not a good story, like you know, hearing about doing a public execution of an animal in part to show how a type of electricity is quote unquote more dangerous than another type. You know, it's that's indefensible, really, but the story is more complicated. We'll leave it at that. However, ultimately a C one out, at least for the purposes of long distance electricity transmission. And and honestly, the reason for that was largely practical because it was way easier to use transformers, which work with a C current but not d C current. And uh, it was easy to use transformers in order to step up voltage for the purposes of long distance transmission, step down voltage when it gets to its destination and make use of it, whereas d C you would have to build way more electric plants closer to the point where it's providing the electricity. So, just from a practical standpoint, a C ultimately one out at least back then now right now, as I record this episode, I'm also on at work on another really big episode about the music industry, both the technology and the business side of the music industry, because the two are extremely closely tied together, Like you can't really I would argue extract one without the other because they inform each other. So the that I am hard at work, it's probably actually gonna be more than one episode about the music industry and technology. So this next format war I want to talk about, plays into that. In the early days of recorded media, like just when people were learning how they could take sound and record that onto a physical object and then play it back, essentially reversing the process. UH, you had companies like Thomas Edison's that were rushing to dominate the space, and there were a few different formats even in the early days. Now, one very early one was wax cylinders, and essentially recording audio meant that you had a cylinder of wax mounted on a spindle. The spindle would rotate, UH, and you would put down a stylus or needle that would carve a groove into the cylinder, and if you were to speak into a device would either be like a horn or a microphone, then it could transmit the vibrations from the sound ultimately to the stylus. That's carving into the wax cylinder, and you're carving a physical representation of the sound that's being presented to this recording device. And to play it back, you would take the cylinder, you'd put it in a player, and you would have a different kind of stylus that would travel through the groove that had already been cut through the recording process. And essentially, again you were just having the same recording process but in reverse, and that's where you would get the sound playing back. But different companies would have different ways of doing this, even as they switched from cylinders, you know, to flat disks like the traditional format we think of if you think of like a vinyl record. Uh, they weren't vinyl back in those days, but it was that same shape, right, the flat disc shape. Well, even then there were still major ways to cut the grooves that were fundamentally different. So one was that you could do sort of a vertical cut grooves. So that meant that as the the disc rotated and you're recording to it, the needle you're using, the stylus you're using is varying in degrees of depth, so it's recording vibrations. Um Essentially up and down along the groove, and when you're playing it back, it would mean that the playback needle would be sloping up or sloping away from the surface, and uh, that's where the vibration would be and would be replicated to create the sound that you would hear. The other way was lateral grooves or lateral cuts, where the groove would vary in width. Right, the needle was vibrating, not up and down, but left and right, and as it was recording, and thus when you're playing it back, same sort of thing. But these two things were not necessarily compatible with one another, which meant that if you bought a player that was dependent upon the vertical cut versus the lateral cut, then you were limited to just those records. So this was another early format war um that was tricky for consumers. Um. Another format that was around the same time and of the same thing, same media, was on all about rotational speed when you were recording and playing back sound. So again, in order again accurate sound out of a player, you need to play the record back at the correct speed. If you have ever tried to play a forty five album, forty five refers to the number of revolutions per minute, so forty five revolutions per minute. In this case, if you were to put a forty five album on a record player, but you set the record player to its thirty three and a third setting, meaning it's rotating thirty three and one third times per minute, then when you listen, everything sounds rue slow because the playback is slower than the recording speed, so it sounds much slower. By by the way, as a kid, I found this endlessly entertaining, either playing forty five on thirty three or finding thirty three albums and playing them at forty five, so everyone sounds like, you know, the chipmunks or whatever. I was easily entertained as a child, and honestly, I'd still have a ready record player this today, and uh it requires some careful uh resistance for me to not just indulge in that silliness even to this day. But you know, there were so many different speed playback formats in the early days. Like, it wasn't just forty five and thirty three or even seventy eight, which would become an early standard. There were tons of different ones, typically ranging between sixty all the way up to like a hundred eighty Now, that could have caused an enormous problem them. Right, Like, if all record players could were limited to playing back at a specific speed, that would be a nightmare because it would mean that if you were shopping for a record, you'd have to make absolutely sure that the record was recorded at the same speed that your turntable could play back at. Otherwise it would just not sound right, it would sound very wrong. However, most turntables, most record players that we didn't really call them that at the time, but that's what they were. Most of them at the time were actually capable of playing back at very different speeds, Like you could set it to whichever speed you need to. Sometimes you have to do it manually and kind of dial it in so that you know, it might mean that you're taking a little time to get it to sound just right. But you had that kind of, uh, that kind of flexibility for a lot of those tables. So because of that, the format wars weren't spilling over into a negative consumer experience too much. It would actually take several decades for the music industry to gravitate toward three and then really to RPM standards. So the first one, as I mentioned, earlier was seventy eight RPM. That was pretty close to what a lot of the old traditional records used. You know, a lot of them were somewhere between the seventy and eighty RPM, So seventy eight was kind of a well for multiple reasons, it was set upon as a standard. Of those reasons also involved the fact that when people stopped using like spring loaded playback machines and they started using gear devices, gear ratios ended up creating the necessity to stick with certain types of of RPM. The combination of electric motors and gear ratios meant that there were certain RPM speeds that were easy to attain, and seventy eight was one of them. But later on there was the forty five rpm, which was the seven inch format. This was primarily used for stuff that just needed a couple of minutes of audio on each side, so it was ideal for things like record singles. You know, you have a single song on side A and a single song on side B and that's all you would have. Then you also had the thirty three and a third rpm speed. That one became synonymous with full length record albums. And you have to remember also that there were different companies pushing these different RPM formats, right, Like, it's not that these were just two formats that were out there on records. It was that you had companies that were really pushing to make that the standard and not the other one. But as it turns out, both of them would survive, and the reason they would survive is because they filled different purposes. Right. You had the forty five, which was great for singles. So if you were say a teenager who that was the market that was really into buying music, you might want to save your money and just buy a single song that you were like, you're not interested in the full album, and so that was a niche that the forty five field. You might be a collector and you want an entire album, and you're gonna spend a little bit more money, so you go and get the thirty three and a third album, full length album. Um, this shaped music in ways that go well beyond this episode. I will touch on that on the Music Industry episodes, because again, the format itself would change the way people made music. It's really fascinating history when you get into it. But the important bit here is just that because both of these had a use, they ultimately would both be adopted as standards and and ultimately the different companies would end up adopting the other standards as well, so it stopped being something that was brand specific and just became the different formats that were available for record collectors. And there are a bunch of others we can talk about that happened over the following decades. For example, there was an infamous battle that was primarily between our c A and its subsidiary NBC versus CBS in the United States, and this was over the format of color television broadcast technology. Now, r c A and CBS were bitter rivals in trying to establish what should be the standardized color television broadcast format, and initially CBS appeared to secure that format in the US UH, despite our CIA really putting up a fuss about it. However, before CBS could really intrench itself, the Korean War broke out and the United States got involved, and UH and some technical challenges on top of the shortage of materials sidelined color broadcast television in the US. Also, at the same time, our c A was determined to sand bag cbs IS operations by only selling black and white sets. R c A would not sell color sets, and the CBS color broadcast format was such that it wasn't compatible with the older black and white sets, so if you had a black and white set, you weren't able to watch those color broadcasts. So our c A had a vested interest in in this because the executives wanted to establish our CIAS tech as the standard. But there was also a practical consideration that whatever color broadcast standard was being used should be one that would be viewable even if you still only had a black and white set, so you'd still be able to watch the broadcast, you just wouldn't have color. Obviously, by the time the US was ready to really get back into color broadcast, CBS had given up. It gave up. In fact, I think it gave up like a week before, or maybe even a day before the US announced that it was ready to look at color broadcast standards, and CBS had already pulled the plug at that point, and our c A was in a position to really pick it back up. It's technology would provide the foundation for the National Television System Committee, or in t SC format now with color TV. I would say that our CIS actions, while motivated primarily by a desire to dominate the market, would end up having an enormous benefit to the average US consumer an audience member, because it meant that you didn't have to worry about your television only being able to receive a subset of all available broadcasts. Color broadcasts could come through on your old black and white sets, just you wouldn't see color, but you would get the broadcast, and your color sets would also be able to pick up older black and white transmissions. Uh. And meanwhile, broadcast stations could rush to get up to speed. So that was an example where again that happened behind the scenes didn't really impact most consumers. There weren't very a many color televisions that were available before the Korean War really sidelined everything, So that ended up being a hiccup in technological progress that ultimately benefited the consumer. When we come back, we'll cover a few more examples before we wrap up, but first let's take this quick break. Okay, let's get back to music. Another big format war happened between cassette tapes, which were all the rage when I was a kid man. Mix tapes. Yeah, those are kind of back in in style, largely because the guardians of the galaxy. And of course people have been making things like playlists and you know, burn CDs and stuff forever too. But yeah, mix tapes is what we called them back when I was a kid. But you know, there was this format war before the cassette tape really established itself, where it was the cassette tape versus eight tracks versus four track tapes. Now, four track tapes didn't get a whole lot of love outside of audio file circles. Uh, they didn't really take off big time in the consumer space. Eight tracks did a little bit better. Uh. Some car manufacturers would incorporate eight track players into vehicles, so these were also cassettes of a type. But eight track tapes had some pretty big drawbacks. One of the major ones was that you could not rewind and eight track tape. So let's say that you put an eight track of an album in your in your jeep and starts playing and you're like, oh, no, I like the first song on this side, but this is like the third song. You'd have to end up flipping it over to the second side, go all the way to the end of that like either play it or or whatever, and then Ultimately you can flip it back over and listen to the first song on side A. It was not convenient. Cassette tapes were smaller than eight tracks, and you could rewind them. You could also tape over them. Eventually, so over time they won out in the format war. They had enough advantages that they became much more popular, and essentially eight tracks kind of faded into obscurity. Now, when I think the actual phrase format war, there's one specific one that leads to my mind because it was settling down when I was a kid. Right, I'm not saying that this was the most important format war or anything like that. It's just the one, like, if I hear that phrase, this is what I think of, And that was the video cassette format war. Primarily, I'm talking about VHS, which was championed by the company j v C. And on the other side you had Beta Max, which was a Sony product. Now there were other home media contenders to those were not the only two, but they were the two big big players in the space. You had like laser disc. You also had ce D Systems UM which I could go off on a rabbit trail on the I have one in this office. Uh, they were not popular, but I still own one. I don't know if it works, but I've got one. Anyway, Let's get back to cassettes. So if VCR systems had only allowed for playback, If if VCR and Beta Max could only play back recorded material that was sold, like you would go out and buy a copy of a video and that's the only thing you could do with them, then it's very possible that Beta Max could have won out because Beta max quality was marginally better than VHS. Although both formats did evolve over time, it's not like they they emerged with one quality and never changed. But the thing that really gave v HS a big advantage in the long run is that you could use these to record material from say a television onto tape so you can watch it again later. Uh. That was something that the industry was not in favor of, but it ultimately happened. And this is where VHS really was superior. You could fit more content onto a single VHS tape than you could with Beta Max, and this ultimately contributed largely to VHS winning out. But it took years. It was not like this was an overnight thing. This this took place over years and years, and it was a vicious fight. Uh it wasn't a guarantee that VHS was going to win, But by the early nineteen eighties, Beta Max was kind of treated like a punchline. It became the you know, the the big example of a technology that failed to secure relevance at least around that time period. Uh. Next, we're gonna skip over a whole bunch of other stuff in order to get to a similar story that played out in the two thousands, like mid to late two thousand's. So yeah, it was the nineteen seventies when we had the VHS versus Beta Max war, and three decades later we would get a brand new home video format war, which would pit Blu Ray versus h D DVD. You all know how that turned out, because we don't talk about h D DVD anymore, and we still could get a Blue Ray if we really want one. And some of you might be too young to even remember this format war, but back in the mid to late two thousand's, this was a really big deal. Both formats were vying to become the next big thing after the DVD, Like this was supposed to be the step into h D television UH, and DVD was somewhat limited in that. So you had Blu Ray, which was backed by Sony, and Toshiba was behind h D DVD, and these two companies rushed to foreign partnerships, both with other technology companies so that you know, there'll be other companies producing players that could play Blu ray or h D DVD, but they also rushed out to foreign partnerships with media companies, like the companies that were actually making the content, in order to secure exclusive deals, which meant that consumers were faced with this problem that, you know, the movies and shows they really liked, they might only be available on a single format, and that meant that if you wanted those movies, you had to buy into that format. And in the beginning, the very beginning, it looked like h D DVD might have a bit of an edge. UH. First of all, it came out a little bit earlier than Blu ray by a few months. Secondly, early on, HD DVD attracted some major studios onto its side, but Sony would turn around and play some pretty brilliant strokes of its own UH. And it didn't hurt that Blu ray also had some technical advantages on top of that, a big one being that it could hold more information than an HD DVD disc could, so you could put more onto a Blu Ray. For another, Blu Ray could support more advanced piracy prevention technologies than HD DVD could. HDDVD had an advantage and that it was not quite as expensive, so that was a big boost. But Sony's really brilliant move was that they built a Blu Ray player into a PlayStation three. That meant that you could have a games station, a game's console that could also serve as a media player, which obviously today that's pretty common thing, but back then it was pretty new. Plus those additional protections. That privacy protection was really attractive to studios, right They were terrified of the thought of losing out on revenue due to piracy, so anything that could cut that down was a big bonus for them, and one by one studios began to side with Sony, until by two thousand and eight it was pretty clear that HD DVD was dead in the water, Like Warner Brothers left h D DVD, and at that point all the major studios had had had jumped ship. In fact, I remember attending c E S one year where just a couple of weeks before the show, h D DVD hold out of c E S. So there was this big empty spot on the show floor where there was supposed to be an HD DVD booth, but there was nothing because you know, again a couple of weeks before the show happened, they decided to you know, they didn't have any good news to share and they didn't want to have to face the music at that point. It wasn't long after that that HD DVD was for all intents and purposes dead. So Blu Ray one that format war, and it meant that all those people who got h D DVD players and a library of disks, we're stuck with the technology that ultimately went obsolete. Um like, once those players stopped working and there's not an easy way to repair them. Those discs are you know, paper weights. Now, of course we still have format wars going on today, some of them have settled into different lines of products that can coexist. So like in the early days of personal computers, we had several different styles of computers, right, you had you know, Commodore sixty four. Uh, you would have the Apple, you would have Sinclair machines, you had all these different computer systems, and over time they mostly shook out two PCs, which really was just shorthand to describe any computer that was built upon architecture that IBM first offered as a personal computer. And then on the other side you had Apple and we continue to have that to this day. I mean, there are other ones as well, but those are like the two primary ones, and they can coexist, they serve different functions. So that was a format war that ultimately kind of settled into two different lines of products. In other cases, however, we've got ongoing format wars that can still cause trouble for consumers, including me. So for example, there is HDR, which is high dynamic range, and this applies to displays, uh primarily things like televisions, but not only television's also computer displays, tablets, all that kind of stuff. They can have HDR technology in them. But here's the tricky thing. HDR does not refer to a specific technology. You don't have just one thing that is HDR. HDR is more like a desired outcome. High dynamic range is a goal, not a technology unto itself, and the outcome is all about creating a large range of color intensities and brightnesses so that you can have really rich, lush and accurate color representation on screen. You can have everything from a dim, dark purple to a bright, vibrant yellow and every other color. Right that, the idea is that HDR gives you incredibly vibrant pictures. That's the goal. The problem is there are different ways to get to that goal. There's not just one technological pathway to lead to h d R, and there are actually several different formats that all aim to do this. The big ones are h lg UH, there's Dolby Vision, there's HDR ten that's the most common of the formats, and there's HDR ten plus. So Dolbie Vision has really incredible capabilities, like it is technically one of the most advanced of the HDR formats. However, Dolbi Vision is also a proprietary Now that means that anyone who wants to make use of Dolby Vision, whether it's a television manufacturer right it's a it's someone that's creating televisions that are capable of showing Dolby Vision, or it's a format like a like a UH. Someone who's creating media and they want the media to be in Dolbie Vision. No matter what, if you want to make use of Dolbie Vision, you have to pay. You have to pay a licensing fee, and um companies typically don't like having to pay a license fees. If they can find a way around it, like if they've got a free option, they would much prefer to do that because they keep more of the money themselves. So HDR ten is an open standard. That's why it's the most common because you can use it for free. Like you can make use of that open standard, but it's not as advanced as doy'll be Vision. So you get your HDR output, but it's not as good as if you were to use Dolby Vision. Now, all of this is on the back end, right, like you have all these companies that are making deals about whether or not they're going to pay a licensing fee and use something like they'll be Vision, or they're going to go with an open standard, or maybe they will support multiple ones. But on the consumer side, it gets really messy and really confusing because not all HDR television's support all HDR formats. That's what I find really frustrating about format wars like this because You can go out and buy an HDR capable TV, but if it only supports say HDR ten, then it doesn't necessarily support something like Dolby Vision. And you might think, Oh, I'm gonna watch this it's an HDR, But if it's an HDR and it uses Dolbi Vision, you won't be able to experience the HDR. So this is really upsetting to me because it means that you actually have to do a lot more homework before you go out and buy something. Right. You can't just oh, this TV is on sale, I need a new TV. I'm gonna buy it, and then I can watch all this stuff maybe or at least maybe with the HDR, but you might not be able to if the television doesn't support the formats that are available on the media you have. By the way, this gets even more complicated when you start talking about things you connect to your TV. Because let's say that you have like a streaming device. Let's say the television is not its own smart TV, it doesn't have native access to streaming apps, and you have it connected to a streaming device. Well, the streaming device also needs to have those same compatibilities. So anywhere in a chain. If you are lacking a compatibility, then you miss out on that that particular feature. And this is really the downside for me for format wars. It's why I think standardization is so important because it removes that confusion and ambiguity and it improves the customer experience. It doesn't necessarily mean we get the absolute best version of whatever that technology is. We might make some compromises. But what it does mean is that when you buy technology A, you know it can play everything that was made for technology A right or whatever. The play is too limiting because this goes well beyond media, but that is that's the argument for standardization is that doesn't mean that you get the absolute best version of everything, but that you can be confident that the version you do get is something you can use. That's the big benefit of standardization. Now, maybe you one day, you and me and everybody else listening to this will all be like super wealthy and we won't care, Like we won't care if if one format is not compatible with the other, because we'll just buy all of them. But I don't know about y'all. I do not appear to be on that track anytime soon. So for the meantime, I'm going to continue being my grouchy old man self and argue for standardization. I hope you enjoyed what was going to be a Tech Stuff tidbits, but I'm looking at the I'm looking at my recording right now, and it's as long as a normal episode, very typical. Go ahead, get your licks in now. I deserve them. If you want to chi to be on Twitter for being a chatty Cathy, the handle is tech Stuff hs W. Also reach out if you have any suggestions for topics you would love for me to cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a trend in tech, a company, uh, an important person in tech, any of those things, let me know. Or if there's like a guest you would love for me to have on the show. I've really enjoyed having guests on recently. It's um it's always a challenge to schedule those kind of things, but I think they bring a lot of value to the show, and I know you folks really appreciate getting to listen to someone besides just me. So if there's anyone out there that you think would be an excellent guest for whatever purpose, as long as you know technology related, let me know. Send me that message tech stuff hsw on Twitter and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I heart Radio production. 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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? Well, it's time for a tech stuff tidbits. This one will probably be a long one, like a lot of mine. I get it. I'm bad at being brief, but I thought I would talk a little bit about format wars, which I've talked about before, but uh, it was one of those that I really wanted to kind of talk about to explain what we mean when we say format war and what that can imply. And the older you are, the more format wars you have likely witnessed firsthand. Like I can think of a handful that I've seen, but of course there are plenty that we're way before my time. So what is a format war? Why can they be really bad, particular for consumers? And what are a few examples. That's what we're gonna look at today, But first let's define it. So a format war essentially is when you've got two similar technologies, so they each accomplish the same thing, or at least a very similar outcome. They're both meant to provide for the same purpose, they might do it in very different ways. In fact, frequently they do approach this in extremely different ways. And typically these two different or more. Sometimes it's more than just two. But these different technologies are incompatible with one another. So they're each meant to achieve a certain goal, but they can't work together because they're doing it in a fundamentally different way or sometimes a subtly different way, but a way that's different enough that they can't work together. So, in other words, if you buy technology A, then you aren't really able to use the stuff for technology B on it. Like we see this very easily and stuff like consoles, right, we think of the console wars where you have an Xbox or a PlayStation or a Nintendo. Well, you can't play PlayStation games on an Xbox, you can't play Xbox games on a Nintendo, and so forth right, you can get the titles for those particular consoles, but you can't put an Xbox you know, disk in a PlayStation console. It won't work. I mean you could do it, it just wouldn't work. Now. One way you could get around that is if you buy all the consoles. Right, So if you have a Tech A and a Tech B. The one way you could get around being limited is you could also buy tech B. But then you're spending way more cash. And ain't all of us got that kind of cheddar? You know what I'm saying. I am not the kind of person who can buy every format just so that way I have access to everything. And you know, we really do see this today played out in other ways, like the different streaming services I would argue are kind of a format war. Um, it's more of a streaming war because the format is pretty much the same. It's not like, you know, if you have uh one type of streaming device versus another, that you're limited to specific types of streaming content. But otherwise it's very similar in that if you want access to everything, you gotta subscribe to everything, which is pretty frustrating as a consumer. So the reason format wars tend to be bad for consumers is that we're faced with really tough choices. If we want whatever the technology actually does, then we then have to decide which option do we go with. Do we go with tech A or do we go with tech B. We do that knowing that our choice is going to lock us in from that point forward into that technologies ecosystem again unless we go crazy and buy all of them. So if we do that, if we're buying a specific one, we say, all right, I've looked at both tech A and tech B really for a long time. I have ultimately decided that Tech A is the one that I like more, so I'm gonna go with that. Um. But we do that knowing that we're gonna miss out on anything that was made explicitly and exclusively for Tech B. And likewise, if we had made the other choice, we'd be facing the same situation, just in reverse. So you can go with a road less traveled and it will make all the difference. But different does not mean better. It doesn't mean worse either. It means different, and you might feel reluctant to get on board in the first place early on in a format war, because sometimes formats go obsolete. In several of the examples that will talk about in this episode, one or more formats would ultimately fall to a different one that would survive, and obviously that means that anyone who has backed a failed format is left with a piece of technology that becomes increasingly irrelevant and ultimately obsolete. Meanwhile, if you want to stay up to speed, you have to bite the bullet and buy the other format. Either that or you just you know, wash your hands the whole thing and walk away from technology and live out in the woods, which, trust me, I have been tempted to do on numerous occasions. Now, if this happens to you once or twice, where you back a format and the format ultimately fails, you might end up being a little gun shy around emerging formats. You might then have a philosophy of this looks really cool. There are two different versions of this thing, and they're fighting each other. I'm just gonna wait and see how this shakes out before I jump on board. Right you, you've been bitten too many times. There are early adopters who who just live for this stuff and they go out and they'll buy every new thing as it comes out. Um, I don't know where they're getting their money from. It is not the same place where I get my money from, because they don't let me get that kind of money. So in that case, you might feel like a wait and see approach is better. And honestly, this is sort of what I typically do, although I do occasionally fall victim to getting hyped because you have to suppress the evil feeling of fomo, you know, the fear of missing out, particularly as you see other folks really enjoying their technology while you just sort of sit and wait. I'm kind of imagining now people playing video games while writing jet skis and flying over waves or something. Now, one thing that can happen with format wars is that the industry as a whole sometimes will coalesce around a unified standard. And it is best for the consumer anyway when this happens before products ever come to market, because at that point, customers have the option to buy whichever brand of the technology they like, and they know it should work with pretty much anything else made for that specific use case. So, in other words, like there are times where companies will all be developing a technology that's meant to do something similar, and the companies, well, then behind closed doors essentially meet with one another, hash it out, make compromises, and create a more unified technology before they come to market. So then when you go to the store, you're like, all right, well, there's brand A version of this, there's Brand B version of this, there's Brand C, version of this, but they all do the same thing, and the stuff that's made for them will work on the other ones. That's ideal for customers. Doesn't always happen that way, but we have seen that happen a few times. UH, Like the Compact Disc. While it did have competitive competing formats, the Compact disc was not like by itself, but the Compact Disc benefited because that was it was the product of that kind of compromise before it came to market, and that ultimately meant that consumers had fewer incompatible formats in front of them in order to uh to enjoy that technology. So it does happen, but um often we won't see agreement in an industry on a particular standard until after different formats have already hit the marketing. But then, of course it's too late. At least some portion of the consumer public will be left behind if ultimately everyone then agrees upon a standard. All right, Well, let's talk about a few famous format wars. And there's quite a few of them. There have been dozens of them. I'm gonna stick with some that aren't very obscure, Like I'm gonna stick with some well known ones just for the purposes of kind of explaining what was going on, and a lot of them will relate to technology and various forms of media, because that's one realm. Whereas consumers, we have seen format wars, you know, front and center, like those tend to be the most uh published or publicized format wars in our era and uh And when I'm talking about media, I'm really talking about any content that plays upon technology. It could be media in the form of music, it could be shows and movies or or whatever, or it could be software. So that's kind of what I mean when I say media. But one format that I've talked about a format war that I covered in past episodes. I also talked about this when I I appeared as the Quizster on Ridiculous History. If you've never listened to Ridiculous History, you should check it out. It's a very fun show and once in a rare while I'll pop on as a ridiculous, over the top villain called the Quister. But there was one episode where I showed up and talked about rail gauges, as in railroad tracks, you know what trains travel upon. In the very early days of railroads, you had different engineers and different companies that were building train engines and cars or rather like bogeis or trucks as they're sometimes called. These are the wheeled frames that sit on the rails and then you essentially bolt cars onto these frames. Well, the were a lot of people making these, and they were making them at different sizes, Like they had designed the tracks and the the trains uh to run on a specific width of rails, and they weren't all the same everywhere. So this is just a random, like hypothetical example. You could have a region within a country where one part of the region there's, uh, there's a company that's laying down tracks that are a hundred centimeters apart because the wheels on their vehicles are a hundred centimeters apart. But elsewhere in that same region, you might have folks building other trains where they've settled on a width that's a hundred twenty centimeters apart. And so you can't have a train that was built for one run on the tracks of the other, right, because you know, if a train were to encounter a section of track where suddenly there was a twenty centimeter difference in the width apart from the rails, the train's gonna go flying off the track it you know, the wheels can't expand with it. So this obviously was a limiting factor. So as people were building train tracks, they eventually arrived at locations where other tracks were also being built at a different width, and that meant there was no way for a train to pass from one set to another, and if you really wanted to travel long distance, chances are you would have to change trains, perhaps a few times in different towns. In fact, there was one town in Pennsylvania where this became a cornerstone of their local economy. They counted on the fact that you had different rail gauges all terminating at this one town because it would mean that trains would have to stop in that town, and then the locals often found employment by doing stuff that was related to the fact people were stopped in the town in order to change trains. So there were people who made money as as porters who were unlow trains or loading other trains. You had a lot of people who are making money because they were providing food or lodging or both two travelers. So when you had government saying, you know, it would make way more sense for us to settle on a standard rail gage so that you could travel seamlessly from point A to point B without having these issues. Towns like this one in Pennsylvania really objected to that, and by objected, I mean like they were. They got a little rowdy, they started tearing up train tracks. That's how bad this format war was going. Because they saw it as their livelihood and if you were too streamline things, it might be better for the passengers, but it wouldn't be better for this town. So this was a format war where depending upon what side you were on, like what where you were coming from, if you were coming from the perspective of a traveler or you were coming from the perspective of a townsperson who is dependent upon this for their living, you had a very different view on what was important. Now. Ultimately, at least in most cases, UH standards were arrived at and the train gauge was set to a specific width. UH. There are still trains in countries even like the United States that have a different rail gauge, but they tend to be curiosities now. They're like tourist attractions UM and typically are not really used that much in industry these days. So you can. You can sometimes find these in interesting places where you know people have maintained the tracks and the systems so that you can experience it. But if you're traveling coast to coast, then you're on standardized rail gauge. So that was a format work that was long in the making and took a long time to resolve and didn't go easily. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break here, but when we come back, we'll talk about some more format wars. Okay, let's get back to it. So another really big and important format war, particularly here in the United States back in the day, like like late eighteen hundreds into the nineteen hundreds, was alternating current versus direct current. So here in the US, that war was really personified as Thomas Edison on the direct current side versus George Westinghouse on the alternating current side. Though some people will substitute George Westinghouse. They'll they'll put in Nicola Tesla instead, and it becomes Tesla versus Edison. That's not really an accurate description because Edison was really more of a business owner as was Westinghouse, and Tesla was more of an engineer. Um. But we often see it Edison versus Tesla's really Edison versus Westinghouse. And anyway, Westinghouson and Tesla were on the alternating current side. There were numerous promotional stunts that both sides held in an effort to have their own standard adopted for the purposes of building out infrastructure throughout the United States. I mean this was like, this was representing a true fortune in investments right in order to build out power plants and all the wiring and everything that would be needed in order to transmit power to the average American citizen. It is hard to put a figure on how big a a fortune that was a potential fortune. So clearly the stakes were very high between d C and a C, and they each had their own uh benefits and drawbacks, but ultimately a C would win out like they were. And again there were some huge promotional battles. A big one was when Westinghouse managed to to land the contract for the World's Fair to light the World's Fair. But and of course there's there's stories that have grown with the retelling, such as the the electrocution of an elephant named Topsy using alternating current um, which was frequently attributed to Edison in recent years, but really it was more like Edison's company that did this. And the story gets really complex. It's still not a good story, like you know, hearing about doing a public execution of an animal in part to show how a type of electricity is quote unquote more dangerous than another type. You know, it's that's indefensible, really, but the story is more complicated. We'll leave it at that. However, ultimately a C one out, at least for the purposes of long distance electricity transmission. And and honestly, the reason for that was largely practical because it was way easier to use transformers, which work with a C current but not d C current. And uh, it was easy to use transformers in order to step up voltage for the purposes of long distance transmission, step down voltage when it gets to its destination and make use of it, whereas d C you would have to build way more electric plants closer to the point where it's providing the electricity. So, just from a practical standpoint, a C ultimately one out at least back then now right now, as I record this episode, I'm also on at work on another really big episode about the music industry, both the technology and the business side of the music industry, because the two are extremely closely tied together, Like you can't really I would argue extract one without the other because they inform each other. So the that I am hard at work, it's probably actually gonna be more than one episode about the music industry and technology. So this next format war I want to talk about, plays into that. In the early days of recorded media, like just when people were learning how they could take sound and record that onto a physical object and then play it back, essentially reversing the process. UH, you had companies like Thomas Edison's that were rushing to dominate the space, and there were a few different formats even in the early days. Now, one very early one was wax cylinders, and essentially recording audio meant that you had a cylinder of wax mounted on a spindle. The spindle would rotate, UH, and you would put down a stylus or needle that would carve a groove into the cylinder, and if you were to speak into a device would either be like a horn or a microphone, then it could transmit the vibrations from the sound ultimately to the stylus. That's carving into the wax cylinder, and you're carving a physical representation of the sound that's being presented to this recording device. And to play it back, you would take the cylinder, you'd put it in a player, and you would have a different kind of stylus that would travel through the groove that had already been cut through the recording process. And essentially, again you were just having the same recording process but in reverse, and that's where you would get the sound playing back. But different companies would have different ways of doing this, even as they switched from cylinders, you know, to flat disks like the traditional format we think of if you think of like a vinyl record. Uh, they weren't vinyl back in those days, but it was that same shape, right, the flat disc shape. Well, even then there were still major ways to cut the grooves that were fundamentally different. So one was that you could do sort of a vertical cut grooves. So that meant that as the the disc rotated and you're recording to it, the needle you're using, the stylus you're using is varying in degrees of depth, so it's recording vibrations. Um Essentially up and down along the groove, and when you're playing it back, it would mean that the playback needle would be sloping up or sloping away from the surface, and uh, that's where the vibration would be and would be replicated to create the sound that you would hear. The other way was lateral grooves or lateral cuts, where the groove would vary in width. Right, the needle was vibrating, not up and down, but left and right, and as it was recording, and thus when you're playing it back, same sort of thing. But these two things were not necessarily compatible with one another, which meant that if you bought a player that was dependent upon the vertical cut versus the lateral cut, then you were limited to just those records. So this was another early format war um that was tricky for consumers. Um. Another format that was around the same time and of the same thing, same media, was on all about rotational speed when you were recording and playing back sound. So again, in order again accurate sound out of a player, you need to play the record back at the correct speed. If you have ever tried to play a forty five album, forty five refers to the number of revolutions per minute, so forty five revolutions per minute. In this case, if you were to put a forty five album on a record player, but you set the record player to its thirty three and a third setting, meaning it's rotating thirty three and one third times per minute, then when you listen, everything sounds rue slow because the playback is slower than the recording speed, so it sounds much slower. By by the way, as a kid, I found this endlessly entertaining, either playing forty five on thirty three or finding thirty three albums and playing them at forty five, so everyone sounds like, you know, the chipmunks or whatever. I was easily entertained as a child, and honestly, I'd still have a ready record player this today, and uh it requires some careful uh resistance for me to not just indulge in that silliness even to this day. But you know, there were so many different speed playback formats in the early days. Like, it wasn't just forty five and thirty three or even seventy eight, which would become an early standard. There were tons of different ones, typically ranging between sixty all the way up to like a hundred eighty Now, that could have caused an enormous problem them. Right, Like, if all record players could were limited to playing back at a specific speed, that would be a nightmare because it would mean that if you were shopping for a record, you'd have to make absolutely sure that the record was recorded at the same speed that your turntable could play back at. Otherwise it would just not sound right, it would sound very wrong. However, most turntables, most record players that we didn't really call them that at the time, but that's what they were. Most of them at the time were actually capable of playing back at very different speeds, Like you could set it to whichever speed you need to. Sometimes you have to do it manually and kind of dial it in so that you know, it might mean that you're taking a little time to get it to sound just right. But you had that kind of, uh, that kind of flexibility for a lot of those tables. So because of that, the format wars weren't spilling over into a negative consumer experience too much. It would actually take several decades for the music industry to gravitate toward three and then really to RPM standards. So the first one, as I mentioned, earlier was seventy eight RPM. That was pretty close to what a lot of the old traditional records used. You know, a lot of them were somewhere between the seventy and eighty RPM, So seventy eight was kind of a well for multiple reasons, it was set upon as a standard. Of those reasons also involved the fact that when people stopped using like spring loaded playback machines and they started using gear devices, gear ratios ended up creating the necessity to stick with certain types of of RPM. The combination of electric motors and gear ratios meant that there were certain RPM speeds that were easy to attain, and seventy eight was one of them. But later on there was the forty five rpm, which was the seven inch format. This was primarily used for stuff that just needed a couple of minutes of audio on each side, so it was ideal for things like record singles. You know, you have a single song on side A and a single song on side B and that's all you would have. Then you also had the thirty three and a third rpm speed. That one became synonymous with full length record albums. And you have to remember also that there were different companies pushing these different RPM formats, right, Like, it's not that these were just two formats that were out there on records. It was that you had companies that were really pushing to make that the standard and not the other one. But as it turns out, both of them would survive, and the reason they would survive is because they filled different purposes. Right. You had the forty five, which was great for singles. So if you were say a teenager who that was the market that was really into buying music, you might want to save your money and just buy a single song that you were like, you're not interested in the full album, and so that was a niche that the forty five field. You might be a collector and you want an entire album, and you're gonna spend a little bit more money, so you go and get the thirty three and a third album, full length album. Um, this shaped music in ways that go well beyond this episode. I will touch on that on the Music Industry episodes, because again, the format itself would change the way people made music. It's really fascinating history when you get into it. But the important bit here is just that because both of these had a use, they ultimately would both be adopted as standards and and ultimately the different companies would end up adopting the other standards as well, so it stopped being something that was brand specific and just became the different formats that were available for record collectors. And there are a bunch of others we can talk about that happened over the following decades. For example, there was an infamous battle that was primarily between our c A and its subsidiary NBC versus CBS in the United States, and this was over the format of color television broadcast technology. Now, r c A and CBS were bitter rivals in trying to establish what should be the standardized color television broadcast format, and initially CBS appeared to secure that format in the US UH, despite our CIA really putting up a fuss about it. However, before CBS could really intrench itself, the Korean War broke out and the United States got involved, and UH and some technical challenges on top of the shortage of materials sidelined color broadcast television in the US. Also, at the same time, our c A was determined to sand bag cbs IS operations by only selling black and white sets. R c A would not sell color sets, and the CBS color broadcast format was such that it wasn't compatible with the older black and white sets, so if you had a black and white set, you weren't able to watch those color broadcasts. So our c A had a vested interest in in this because the executives wanted to establish our CIAS tech as the standard. But there was also a practical consideration that whatever color broadcast standard was being used should be one that would be viewable even if you still only had a black and white set, so you'd still be able to watch the broadcast, you just wouldn't have color. Obviously, by the time the US was ready to really get back into color broadcast, CBS had given up. It gave up. In fact, I think it gave up like a week before, or maybe even a day before the US announced that it was ready to look at color broadcast standards, and CBS had already pulled the plug at that point, and our c A was in a position to really pick it back up. It's technology would provide the foundation for the National Television System Committee, or in t SC format now with color TV. I would say that our CIS actions, while motivated primarily by a desire to dominate the market, would end up having an enormous benefit to the average US consumer an audience member, because it meant that you didn't have to worry about your television only being able to receive a subset of all available broadcasts. Color broadcasts could come through on your old black and white sets, just you wouldn't see color, but you would get the broadcast, and your color sets would also be able to pick up older black and white transmissions. Uh. And meanwhile, broadcast stations could rush to get up to speed. So that was an example where again that happened behind the scenes didn't really impact most consumers. There weren't very a many color televisions that were available before the Korean War really sidelined everything, So that ended up being a hiccup in technological progress that ultimately benefited the consumer. When we come back, we'll cover a few more examples before we wrap up, but first let's take this quick break. Okay, let's get back to music. Another big format war happened between cassette tapes, which were all the rage when I was a kid man. Mix tapes. Yeah, those are kind of back in in style, largely because the guardians of the galaxy. And of course people have been making things like playlists and you know, burn CDs and stuff forever too. But yeah, mix tapes is what we called them back when I was a kid. But you know, there was this format war before the cassette tape really established itself, where it was the cassette tape versus eight tracks versus four track tapes. Now, four track tapes didn't get a whole lot of love outside of audio file circles. Uh, they didn't really take off big time in the consumer space. Eight tracks did a little bit better. Uh. Some car manufacturers would incorporate eight track players into vehicles, so these were also cassettes of a type. But eight track tapes had some pretty big drawbacks. One of the major ones was that you could not rewind and eight track tape. So let's say that you put an eight track of an album in your in your jeep and starts playing and you're like, oh, no, I like the first song on this side, but this is like the third song. You'd have to end up flipping it over to the second side, go all the way to the end of that like either play it or or whatever, and then Ultimately you can flip it back over and listen to the first song on side A. It was not convenient. Cassette tapes were smaller than eight tracks, and you could rewind them. You could also tape over them. Eventually, so over time they won out in the format war. They had enough advantages that they became much more popular, and essentially eight tracks kind of faded into obscurity. Now, when I think the actual phrase format war, there's one specific one that leads to my mind because it was settling down when I was a kid. Right, I'm not saying that this was the most important format war or anything like that. It's just the one, like, if I hear that phrase, this is what I think of, And that was the video cassette format war. Primarily, I'm talking about VHS, which was championed by the company j v C. And on the other side you had Beta Max, which was a Sony product. Now there were other home media contenders to those were not the only two, but they were the two big big players in the space. You had like laser disc. You also had ce D Systems UM which I could go off on a rabbit trail on the I have one in this office. Uh, they were not popular, but I still own one. I don't know if it works, but I've got one. Anyway, Let's get back to cassettes. So if VCR systems had only allowed for playback, If if VCR and Beta Max could only play back recorded material that was sold, like you would go out and buy a copy of a video and that's the only thing you could do with them, then it's very possible that Beta Max could have won out because Beta max quality was marginally better than VHS. Although both formats did evolve over time, it's not like they they emerged with one quality and never changed. But the thing that really gave v HS a big advantage in the long run is that you could use these to record material from say a television onto tape so you can watch it again later. Uh. That was something that the industry was not in favor of, but it ultimately happened. And this is where VHS really was superior. You could fit more content onto a single VHS tape than you could with Beta Max, and this ultimately contributed largely to VHS winning out. But it took years. It was not like this was an overnight thing. This this took place over years and years, and it was a vicious fight. Uh it wasn't a guarantee that VHS was going to win, But by the early nineteen eighties, Beta Max was kind of treated like a punchline. It became the you know, the the big example of a technology that failed to secure relevance at least around that time period. Uh. Next, we're gonna skip over a whole bunch of other stuff in order to get to a similar story that played out in the two thousands, like mid to late two thousand's. So yeah, it was the nineteen seventies when we had the VHS versus Beta Max war, and three decades later we would get a brand new home video format war, which would pit Blu Ray versus h D DVD. You all know how that turned out, because we don't talk about h D DVD anymore, and we still could get a Blue Ray if we really want one. And some of you might be too young to even remember this format war, but back in the mid to late two thousand's, this was a really big deal. Both formats were vying to become the next big thing after the DVD, Like this was supposed to be the step into h D television UH, and DVD was somewhat limited in that. So you had Blu Ray, which was backed by Sony, and Toshiba was behind h D DVD, and these two companies rushed to foreign partnerships, both with other technology companies so that you know, there'll be other companies producing players that could play Blu ray or h D DVD, but they also rushed out to foreign partnerships with media companies, like the companies that were actually making the content, in order to secure exclusive deals, which meant that consumers were faced with this problem that, you know, the movies and shows they really liked, they might only be available on a single format, and that meant that if you wanted those movies, you had to buy into that format. And in the beginning, the very beginning, it looked like h D DVD might have a bit of an edge. UH. First of all, it came out a little bit earlier than Blu ray by a few months. Secondly, early on, HD DVD attracted some major studios onto its side, but Sony would turn around and play some pretty brilliant strokes of its own UH. And it didn't hurt that Blu ray also had some technical advantages on top of that, a big one being that it could hold more information than an HD DVD disc could, so you could put more onto a Blu Ray. For another, Blu Ray could support more advanced piracy prevention technologies than HD DVD could. HDDVD had an advantage and that it was not quite as expensive, so that was a big boost. But Sony's really brilliant move was that they built a Blu Ray player into a PlayStation three. That meant that you could have a games station, a game's console that could also serve as a media player, which obviously today that's pretty common thing, but back then it was pretty new. Plus those additional protections. That privacy protection was really attractive to studios, right They were terrified of the thought of losing out on revenue due to piracy, so anything that could cut that down was a big bonus for them, and one by one studios began to side with Sony, until by two thousand and eight it was pretty clear that HD DVD was dead in the water, Like Warner Brothers left h D DVD, and at that point all the major studios had had had jumped ship. In fact, I remember attending c E S one year where just a couple of weeks before the show, h D DVD hold out of c E S. So there was this big empty spot on the show floor where there was supposed to be an HD DVD booth, but there was nothing because you know, again a couple of weeks before the show happened, they decided to you know, they didn't have any good news to share and they didn't want to have to face the music at that point. It wasn't long after that that HD DVD was for all intents and purposes dead. So Blu Ray one that format war, and it meant that all those people who got h D DVD players and a library of disks, we're stuck with the technology that ultimately went obsolete. Um like, once those players stopped working and there's not an easy way to repair them. Those discs are you know, paper weights. Now, of course we still have format wars going on today, some of them have settled into different lines of products that can coexist. So like in the early days of personal computers, we had several different styles of computers, right, you had you know, Commodore sixty four. Uh, you would have the Apple, you would have Sinclair machines, you had all these different computer systems, and over time they mostly shook out two PCs, which really was just shorthand to describe any computer that was built upon architecture that IBM first offered as a personal computer. And then on the other side you had Apple and we continue to have that to this day. I mean, there are other ones as well, but those are like the two primary ones, and they can coexist, they serve different functions. So that was a format war that ultimately kind of settled into two different lines of products. In other cases, however, we've got ongoing format wars that can still cause trouble for consumers, including me. So for example, there is HDR, which is high dynamic range, and this applies to displays, uh primarily things like televisions, but not only television's also computer displays, tablets, all that kind of stuff. They can have HDR technology in them. But here's the tricky thing. HDR does not refer to a specific technology. You don't have just one thing that is HDR. HDR is more like a desired outcome. High dynamic range is a goal, not a technology unto itself, and the outcome is all about creating a large range of color intensities and brightnesses so that you can have really rich, lush and accurate color representation on screen. You can have everything from a dim, dark purple to a bright, vibrant yellow and every other color. Right that, the idea is that HDR gives you incredibly vibrant pictures. That's the goal. The problem is there are different ways to get to that goal. There's not just one technological pathway to lead to h d R, and there are actually several different formats that all aim to do this. The big ones are h lg UH, there's Dolby Vision, there's HDR ten that's the most common of the formats, and there's HDR ten plus. So Dolbie Vision has really incredible capabilities, like it is technically one of the most advanced of the HDR formats. However, Dolbi Vision is also a proprietary Now that means that anyone who wants to make use of Dolby Vision, whether it's a television manufacturer right it's a it's someone that's creating televisions that are capable of showing Dolby Vision, or it's a format like a like a UH. Someone who's creating media and they want the media to be in Dolbie Vision. No matter what, if you want to make use of Dolbie Vision, you have to pay. You have to pay a licensing fee, and um companies typically don't like having to pay a license fees. If they can find a way around it, like if they've got a free option, they would much prefer to do that because they keep more of the money themselves. So HDR ten is an open standard. That's why it's the most common because you can use it for free. Like you can make use of that open standard, but it's not as advanced as doy'll be Vision. So you get your HDR output, but it's not as good as if you were to use Dolby Vision. Now, all of this is on the back end, right, like you have all these companies that are making deals about whether or not they're going to pay a licensing fee and use something like they'll be Vision, or they're going to go with an open standard, or maybe they will support multiple ones. But on the consumer side, it gets really messy and really confusing because not all HDR television's support all HDR formats. That's what I find really frustrating about format wars like this because You can go out and buy an HDR capable TV, but if it only supports say HDR ten, then it doesn't necessarily support something like Dolby Vision. And you might think, Oh, I'm gonna watch this it's an HDR, But if it's an HDR and it uses Dolbi Vision, you won't be able to experience the HDR. So this is really upsetting to me because it means that you actually have to do a lot more homework before you go out and buy something. Right. You can't just oh, this TV is on sale, I need a new TV. I'm gonna buy it, and then I can watch all this stuff maybe or at least maybe with the HDR, but you might not be able to if the television doesn't support the formats that are available on the media you have. By the way, this gets even more complicated when you start talking about things you connect to your TV. Because let's say that you have like a streaming device. Let's say the television is not its own smart TV, it doesn't have native access to streaming apps, and you have it connected to a streaming device. Well, the streaming device also needs to have those same compatibilities. So anywhere in a chain. If you are lacking a compatibility, then you miss out on that that particular feature. And this is really the downside for me for format wars. It's why I think standardization is so important because it removes that confusion and ambiguity and it improves the customer experience. It doesn't necessarily mean we get the absolute best version of whatever that technology is. We might make some compromises. But what it does mean is that when you buy technology A, you know it can play everything that was made for technology A right or whatever. The play is too limiting because this goes well beyond media, but that is that's the argument for standardization is that doesn't mean that you get the absolute best version of everything, but that you can be confident that the version you do get is something you can use. That's the big benefit of standardization. Now, maybe you one day, you and me and everybody else listening to this will all be like super wealthy and we won't care, Like we won't care if if one format is not compatible with the other, because we'll just buy all of them. But I don't know about y'all. I do not appear to be on that track anytime soon. So for the meantime, I'm going to continue being my grouchy old man self and argue for standardization. I hope you enjoyed what was going to be a Tech Stuff tidbits, but I'm looking at the I'm looking at my recording right now, and it's as long as a normal episode, very typical. Go ahead, get your licks in now. I deserve them. If you want to chi to be on Twitter for being a chatty Cathy, the handle is tech Stuff hs W. Also reach out if you have any suggestions for topics you would love for me to cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a trend in tech, a company, uh, an important person in tech, any of those things, let me know. Or if there's like a guest you would love for me to have on the show. I've really enjoyed having guests on recently. It's um it's always a challenge to schedule those kind of things, but I think they bring a lot of value to the show, and I know you folks really appreciate getting to listen to someone besides just me. So if there's anyone out there that you think would be an excellent guest for whatever purpose, as long as you know technology related, let me know. Send me that message tech stuff hsw on Twitter and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I heart Radio production. 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