Format war in the context of Content (media and publishing)

Phonograph cylinders (also referred to as Edison cylinders after their creator Thomas Edison) are the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound. Known simply as "records" in their heyday (c. 1896–1916), a name since passed to their disc-shaped successors, these hollow cylindrical objects have an audio recording engraved on the outside surface which can be reproduced when they are played on a mechanical cylinder phonograph. The first cylinders were wrapped with tin foil but the improved version made of wax was created a decade later, after which they were commercialized. In the 1910s, the competing disc record system triumphed in the marketplace to become the dominant commercial audio medium.

DVD-Audio (commonly abbreviated as DVD-A) is a digital format for delivering high-fidelity audio content on a DVD. DVD-Audio uses most of the storage on the disc for high-quality audio and is not intended to be a video delivery format.

The standard was published in March 1999 and the first discs entered the marketplace in 2000. DVD-Audio was in a format war with Super Audio CD (SACD), and along with consumers' tastes trending towards downloadable and streaming music, these factors meant that neither high-quality disc achieved considerable market traction; DVD-Audio has been described as "extinct" by 2007. DVD-Audio remains a niche market but some independent online labels offer a wider choice of titles.

The videotape format war was a period of competition or "format war" of incompatible models of consumer-level analog videocassette formats and video cassette recorders (VCRs) in the late 1970s and the 1980s, mainly involving the Betamax and VHS (Video Home System) formats. VHS ultimately emerged as the preeminent format.