Regardless of your side in the HD format war, it's a less well publicised fact that the real enemy to both Blu-ray and HD DVD is market adoption. It is interesting to discover, then, that according to the data both disc types are experiencing better market growth than DVD managed back in the day. Conceding for a moment that we still don't know 100 per cent for sure which HD format is actually going to win the so-called war, the fact that both formats are being more readily accepted is clearly a Good Thing.

According to analysts Displaysearch, sales of DVD discs took around two years to reach the point where the high definition market is now at. In a marvellous feat of what might be called stating the obvious the firm put this down to rapidly dropping price of players and better market awareness. Speaking as one of the journalists who just can't stop harping on about Blu-ray and HD DVD constantly, I think that's only to be expected - media coverage of the format war has been pretty intensive.

Stephen Baker, Vice President of the NDP who kindly supply most of the data used in determining the format war's state of play, suggested that according to his groups research there is a strong expectation that one of the formats will definitely win out. He also suggested that he believes this was likely to be the ‘last run' for physical media, what with downloadable content's continuing growth as an accepted distribution method. Food for thought certainly, but I think the humble disc has a bit of life in it yet - still, it's nice to know the HD formats aren't doing too bad on the sales front, whichever is the more popular.

Link: http://www.trustedreviews.com/home-cinema/news/2008/02/06/HD-Formats-Sales-Growing-Better-Than-DVD/p1

I think this will continue. It's easy to jump into HDM, because all you have to do is buy a new player, which will be an inevitability when your old player breaks anyway. Buying a Blu-Ray or HD DVD player will also make regular DVDs look better as well.

This is one advantage that DVD never had. Many VHS owners were reluctant to adopt DVD because, despite it's advantages over VHS, it would involve them either owning and maintaining multiple players, or else getting rid of their VHS collection. DVD rendered VHS obsolete, which many didn't want to face. With HDM, DVD can still stick around for a nice long time. They can coexist in the marketplace and in people's homes.

Huzzah! I think the idea of going from VHS to DVD was a much bigger jump than DVD to HD though. At any rate, it is good to see the industry progressing and moving over to a more up-to-date format.

thats a really good point, i never thought about it that way before.