by TheBaxter on Thu Dec 14, 2006 3:10 pm
i was pulling for blu-ray (despite the stupid name) for a long time, but now i just don't care. i just want there to be ONE hd format, whether it's blu-ray or hd-dvd. either one is fine, just stop the stupid competition. i think hd-dvd will win out over blu-ray, it's got too many advantages and not enough drawbacks. it's cheaper ($1K for an HD player that doesn't look any better than a $450 one? are you kidding, sony?), it's on-time (how many times has sony delayed blu-ray by now?), it's got a name that makes sense to the average consumer, and though it has less capacity, the end result in PQ is no difference. sure it would've been nice to get a full season of 24 in HD on two discs instead of 4 or 5, but i'll put up with it if we can just get down to one format instead of two.
sony has screwed up their blu-ray strategy so bad, i think it's too late to recover. hd-dvd is going to win that fight, and i'm fine with that. it may be a pyrrhic victory, because soon somebody (maybe apple?) will come up with the movie version of the ipod, and everyone will be able to get their movies online and carry them around with them, keeping a few hundred movies on a device that doesn't take up as much room as a dvd/hd-dvd collection would.
i do think dvd will eventually go away, but it won't matter because by that time hd-dvd players will be as cheap as dvd players are now, and they'll all still play dvds so no one will have to upgrade if they don't want to. they'll play their old dvd's and the new ones they buy will be hd-dvds. and i'm sure there will be plenty of people who do upgrade. the studios already double-dip and triple-dip and quadruple-dip any title they can make a profit on, and they'll continue doing that with hd-dvd as long as the public keeps buying. hd-dvd is a much bigger upgrade from dvd than the typical studio double-dip, so there will be plenty of buyers.
i'm not a collector, i have probably less than 30 movies. i think hd-dvd will be most successful with the collectors who buy hundreds of movies, while the non-physical formats will eventually take over for people like me, with on-demand HD content delivered via the internet or some other high-bandwidth delivery system to a set-top box which will make PPV and movie rentals obsolete. whoever can bring a system like this to market first (apple? netflix? directv? comcast? amazon?) is gonna take over the movie delivery industry.
