One thing that HD-DVD and BD bring to the table is that people can actually get their season TV shows all on one disk instead of 3-5 or more. That's one advantage that has nothing to do with picture clarity. I do agree though, it's not as drastic as a change as VHS to DVD was, but it's an improvement. Just as cassette tapes were an improvement over 8-tracks. It took time, but cassettes took over.
When the costs of the players get in the $100 range or less and the movies drop to current DVD prices ($10-$18) as the media costs drop, look forward to more people taking advantage of this and moving to the next step. Digital download isn't far off, but without a solid increase in bandwidth to the average household and a more reliable method of storage, it won't take over. Hard Drives can lose their data and then you lose your movies unless you purchase them again. You will only lose your HD DVD or BD by physically losing or destroying the disk which is not an easy task unless you try or are just plain and simple careless.
Either way, you won't see fast adoption rate of the HD formats until 2009 at the earliest if not 2010.
My pokemon brings all the nerds to the yard. And they're like, "You wanna trade cards?" Damn right, I wanna trade cards. I'll trade this, but not my charizard.
