If you want to carry your entire movie collection around with you, we will be needing 2-3 tb hard drives.

Blu-ray is fine, and well. This holiday is going to be huge for Blu and next year retail will start making the push towards a new Blu standard. I live in the Seattle area of Washington State, and around here all Best Buys, Circuit Cities, Video Onlys, Fred Myers, Walmarts, and Targets have laready switched to exclusivly LCD TVs. The only place I have come across a SDTV was at a K-mart while I took my little sister school shopping. I know that this may not be the case all across the US right now, as places in the mid west do not pay enough for this to be possible. In the very near future I am sure this will be the case all across the US. This will mean every new TV perchased is an HDTV.

Now this moves us onto why Blu-ray is and will be fine. Retailers make next to nothing on SDTVs, and that is why it is almost imposible to pick one up some places right now. The same is true for DVD, and DVD players. This holiday Retail will be promoting Blu-ray as the must have adult electronic for this holiday and beyond. It is the first christmas were this is a no questions asked game, Blu is the only way to go. Every electronics company with a Blu-ray player on the market is going to be thowing out major discouts or freebees for people interested in Blu.

Once we get though this holiday Retail will start doing their part to slowly cut off the oxygen for DVD. Their is only so much floor space at retail, and they want profit makers in that space, so as the year progresses DVD sections will start to become Blu-ray sections. By this time next year it will be very close to if not more than 50/50 for floor space. As much of a threat as this is to DVD, it is not the only thing going after the space.

In the next 12 months the US is going to see major increases in internet speeds. The Xbox 360, PS3, LG Blu-ray players, and Sony Blu-ray Players are all going to be able to stream compressed 720p movies through either netfilx or PSN. This adds another huge advantage for consumers looking to make the jump. We may not be close to the point were puchasing and storing full HD movies is possible, but renting near HD quilty movies is within reach for a majority of the US. This is the next format in which movies will be consumed. A hybrid between pure data rentals, and physical purchases is the path the only feasible path, and CE companies, and retail are going to make this progression happen, everyone is welcome to jion in. Either by choice or, if you wait about 7 years, by having no other options.

I pay taxes and yes I'm rounding up.

I love no sales tax.

I'll be honest: this fight has been spun so many ways that I'm honestly not sure what to believe now. I've seen (seemingly) convincing evidence that Blu Ray is doing quite well: I've seen evidence like this that (seemingly) convinces me otherwise. Way too much spin. I'll just wait and see what happens. I have an HDTV and Blu Ray player already, so I can absolutely promise that I will not be buying either during this recession.

I've always disliked this line of reasoning.  While yes, there is less of an incentive to upgrade to Blu-Ray from DVD like there was to upgrade to DVD from VHS, it's also much EASIER to ugprade to Blu-Ray from DVD than it was going to DVD from VHS.

When you buy a Blu-Ray player, all your DVDs will play in the machine, and they'll all look better because of it, due to upscaling.  When you bought a DVD player back in 1998, it made all your VHS tapes obsolete, unless you kept both players around (which many people did).  It also did nothing to increase the quality of the movies you already owned.

In a few years, standalone Blu-Ray players will have dropped to or past the $100 mark.  At this point in time, what will keep people from buying a Blu-Ray player over a regular old DVD player?  Hell, manufacturers could just advertise it as a DVD player, and the few uninformed consumers left would never be the wiser.

Blu-Ray drives will probably end up like DVD drives for PCs today.  They can play practically everything, including obscure formats like DVD-Ram, but that's just about all they make, because it's cheaper for manufacturers to focus on 1-2 SKUs.  That's just what you buy.  You don't track down a CD drive for your PC if you have no interest in playing DVDs.  You just buy the DVD drive.

I hope you're right, I'd love to have a monthly subscription fee to PSN and be able to download HD movies in a timely manner, as it is right now, that's not feasible.

I pretty much agree with this. On the other hand, that will likely be at least a couple years until that price point is reached, and I'm not sure how studios respond if it actually does take that long. Blech.

I'm not saying I disagree, Makin, I'm just saying I can see things that point in either direction. I am firmly in the "it's very unclear, there are future indicators that point in both directions, and we don't have many statistics that aren't heavily spun, so let's just wait and see" camp.

Whoops something went wrong here!

My wife came back from China with some "BluRay" movies, and I was shocked... then we tried them in our DVD player, and they all worked. For these, it was a marketing gimmick only.

I was happy, otherwise they would have been useless to us :P