It’s common knowledge by now that Sony has triumphed in the next-gen media race, as its Blu-Ray format seized the gold ahead of Toshiba’s HD-DVD. We at TheGameReviews.com have already reported some of the effects that this has had in the gaming industry, but what has so far not been said is how exactly Sony earned this victory over Toshiba. One part of Sony’s success was featured earlier at TheGameReviews.com

Stephanie Prange, the editor in chief of Home Media Magazine, was quoted as saying that Sony was eager not to have a repeat of the failure of the Betamax format and thusly spent much time planning with establishing lines of customer support for Blu-Ray and also included a Blu-Ray player in Sony’s PS3 console so that the users of Blu-Ray were already there for Sony without any additional marketing required.

According to an article which was authored by a reporter at the BBC the Blu-Ray player contained inside the Playstation 3 had a further leg up in regards to the high quality that  the Blu-Ray offered its customers, experimental format or not, and with the Blu-Ray player found in every console, it offered PS3 owners a high quality gaming and viewing experience that when coupled to the Sony name, resulted in roughly ten million PS3’s, which meant ten million Blu-Ray players also taken home at the same time: two birds with one stone. Toshiba, on the other hand, only managed to sell a total of one million of its HD DVD players.

The deal that Toshiba struck with Microsoft that resulted in an HD-DVD compatible media player was less effective for Toshiba then Sony’s arrangement, as it required Xbox 360 owners to purchase an external HD-DVD drive, meaning that it was an added expense for Xbox 360 users, which already put HD DVD at a disadvantage to Sony. Sadly for Toshiba the sales figures for the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive shows that numerous Xbox owners have simply done without it.

Another nail in the coffin for the HD DVD format was due to the fact that Sony had ensured negotiating agreements with the most influential US film studios to support the Blu-Ray format. Paramount Pictures, Universal, and Warner Brothers did start out agreeing to lend their support to HD-DVD, but Warner Brothers eventually decided to go with the Blu-Ray format, which was a further blow to Toshiba’s HD-DVD. The damage this did to Toshiba was confirmed by Kazuharu Miura, who is employed at the Daiwa Institute of Research located in Tokyo who said “When Warner made its decision, it was basically over.”

So where does the decision by Toshiba to stop making players that support the HD DVD format take the company now? Well, market researchers have discovered, perhaps unsurprisingly, that it will be a benefit. The Goldman Sachs firm, for instance, says that in ceasing to offer HD DVD Toshiba will be saving $370 million dollars a year and a market analyst at Goldman Sachs, Ikuo Matsuhashi, was quoted as saying that “the potential losses are small compared to the savings.”

The current opinion among industry monitors is that the sale of consumer electronics is a minor part of Toshiba’s overall earnings as no more than 6% of Toshiba’s sales, when compared to 40% of its earnings coming from the marketing of computer chips and its investments in nuclear power. For Sony, on the other hand, hardware like DVD players has always been central to Sony’s current strong place in the electronics market.

All in all, though, the end of this fight between Toshiba and Sony is “good for consumers” because “some of whom must have been resisting buying next-generation DVD recorders because of the two incompatible formats” according to Hiroyuki Shimizu who is an analyst at the IT research firm Gartner. Now that Sony has won, according to Shimizu, “consumers don’t have to worry about incompatibility.”

On the other hand, however, other observers of the consumer electronics industry says that the publicity over HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was in many ways a waste of time due to the fact that there is a developing shift among consumers away from DVD to online downloads via Internet and satellite cable TV companies, who offer the same media to their customers. These unnamed naysayers also say that higher quality isn’t always what consumers was as in the case of the Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio formats which, while offering high audio quality, collapsed due to the ability to download music tracks online.

As with Betamax and VHS, as Sony remembers, it wasn’t what had the best quality it was the one that was easiest to use that won the day, and Blu-Ray was already there, ready to use, and had a whole support system in place to go with it, whereas the HD DVD drive for the 360 required more money to buy along with the price of the discs it was easier to go with Blu-Ray.

In simplicity there is beauty you might say.