HD DVD is dead; Blu Ray will lose the war

[Picko]

Garcian Smith said:
Blu-Ray will become the LaserDisc of our time. Anyone else remember LaserDiscs, those huge vinyl-record-sized things that came out in the '80s? Well, they were expensive and offered few benefits over the dominant media of the time (VHS tapes) aside from a modest increase in picture quality. As a consequent, they caught on with videophiles, who hailed them as the Second Coming, but nobody else. (Of course, videophiles would hail snake oil as the Second Coming if Samsung or Sony promised it would improve picture quality...) Everyone else stuck with VHS tapes until a media format with enough benefits over its predecessor - DVDs - came out.

Sound familiar? As of right now, only videophiles care about HD movies, because there's so little of a benefit from them compared to an upscaling DVD player. As a consequent, DVDs will win the format wars, and they'll stay dominant until a new format comes out that offers sufficient benefits over them such that people are willing to upgrade their entire movie collection.

That's how Blu-Ray can win the battle, but lose the war.

That just about sums it up. Neither current HD product will ever gain mainstream appeal.