Who watches movies on a 2 inch screen anyway?

UMD is a non-topic. Next!

 Ofcourse.

 I agree that at current broadband speeds, streaming content is a joke.  The quality from netflix instant watching is atrocious.  But, fiber optics allows speeds up to 100mbps.  That should be more than enough to get hd quality video and sound.  You would only need an ample amount of ram to buffer the content.  You wouldn't even need a hard drive because the server would house all of the data.  Microsoft saw it as a twofer.  If HD-DVD won, all is well and good, they would use it and still push downloads.  If it didn't, they still had downloadable content.

I don't know why anyone would buy an UMD.

They cost MORE than DVDs, usually don't have all the extras, and of course, can only be played on a PSP. And if I'm not mistaken, have inferior quality to DVDs. That's a pretty awful deal if you ask me.

Of course there's the portability, but you can easily rip a DVD you OWN and transfer it to the PSP, iPod or wherever you want to use it and watch it on the go. It'll probaby save you battery, since it will be on flash memory, as opposed to some disc. Some DVDs now even come with a digital copy to watch on your portable device, it doesn't get much easier than that. UMD was a bad idea from the beginning.

But getting back on topic, as others have said, UMD is barely alive and there was no way Miscrosoft could have kept HD-DVD alive for much longer and I don't see how it could have helped them, even if they did it.

UMD will die out when the next PSP is released and uses mini-Blu-ray discs.

Simply because the PSP is selling and UMD is inside the PSP which results the drive is selling!

And that absolutely has nothing to do with movies. It's just moviemakers found out that PSP owners wasn't using the PSP for the movies but for games and music.

Microsoft didn't have charge of the HD-DVD format, Toshiba ran that format, Microsoft was just there to support the format.

Because Sony is the king of the world.

Not James Cameron

First of all this thread is clearly misleading. The only reason why Microsoft didn't put up a battle against the BD is because Microsoft DIDN'T INVENT IT. Toshiba designed and produced the format and therefore had partnerships with various companies in order to broaden their support and hopefully make HD-DVD the successor of DVD.

Sony was left with a bitter taste in their mouth ever since they lost the Betamax vs. VHS debacle and wanted to usher in a new era so they partnered with companies who had the same vision and thus the format war began.

This thread seems more like an excuse for a Sony vs. Microsoft thread than anything else and I just wanted to clear things up for the people who tends to think that way.