New formats are always coming and going. Sometimes the strong survive, sometimes market economics and the capricious whims of fate kill off the strong and the survivor is simply the last man standing.

So it was with the video format in the mid-eighties, when the war was Beta Vs VHS. Beta was always the better format, higher quality, more convenient from every perspective. It was duly squashed as American manufacturers took on Japanese ones and for twenty five years people watched films on an inferior system.

(Just as an aside, this also did huge harm to the independent music industry in New Zealand. Beta was a 'broadcast format”, which is to say that TVNZ and TV3 – between them operating the only three television channels in New Zealand at the time – would play it. VHS was not. Suddenly bands had easy access to video equipment and could make their own music videos. Had that format been Beta the whole shooting match would have changed and anyone would have been able to create broadcast-standard videos. As it was, with VHS and VHS cameras as the available standard, TV managed to ignore all home-made music videos for at least a decade.)

So quality – really – has nothing to do with which format will survive (and, unusually, in the case of VHS Vs Beta, convenience, since Beta tapes were much smaller, didn't win either.

It's often convenience that is the problem. Quadraphonic never took off, partly because listening to music in surround sound is a bit odd. Mainly because it was such a hassle, setting up four speakers in the room. This has now changed, what with access to home movies, so surround has become more useful – though the SACD format, an upmarket version of CDs which allow for 5.1 surround sound seems to have pretty much died out after a big splash around three years ago. The main problem there seemed to be the expense and unavailability of SACD players. (I've never actually even seen one, though I do have some SACDs.)

There are many other much-heralded formats that have only survived a year or so – does anyone remember 8-track?

As far as Blu-Ray goes, the format war – Blu-Ray Vs HDDVD – is over and most people in the know think the wrong format won. There were many advantages to HDDVD (at least for consumers).

But Blu-Ray is new and the uptake seems slow. How many people have a blu-ray player that isn't a Playstation 3? I'd hazard not very many at all. And there are still many problems with the format.

I'll look into those in the near future…

Winston Watusi