I know that MS put quite a bit of cash into the whole HD-DvD vs. Blu-Ray thing but did they actually want HD-DVD to be a winning and lasting format?   Or was it part of a bigger plan to just give Blu-ray enough of a limp to get their new silverlight and other on-line content delivery services up and running before BR became an absolute standard?  Would a successful HD-DVD have caused a problem with Microsoft's digital delivery model?  I would have said that MS pulled out before HD-DVD had a real chance (given it was still competing to some degree) but perhaps they pulled out exactly when the needed to -- just in time to let it fail before it gained any more traction...

I used to think MS was a very short-sighted company that made many dumb decisions at the spur of the moment, but when I step back and look at some of their gaming and entertainment decisions, it makes me wonder if there really are a handful or more smart people that are planning long-range...

People can disagree with your theory but one thing IS certain and its that Microsoft never fully backed HD-DVD as if it were its own.

my opinion is they just tagged along with Toshiba (Panasonic?) w/e, so they had something to combat Blu Ray with, DD wasn't nearly as big or available 3 years ago as it is now.

Only now can we really see DD in gaming possible, like really possible.

i dont think MS made HD-DVD.
they just supported it cause its not Sony, and with Toshiba.

MS would have loved both Silverlight and HD-DVD. You would have both the online and physical distribution under your control. Why try to compete online vs. physical when you could win both? Then you could phase out the physical media and still be earning money while you phase in the online media.

Honestly, until I can get my 20mbps transfer speed for movies with no dips in quality, Blu-Ray will still be superior. 5mbps is not enough for a quality image along with 7.1 quality sound. Since I already have a Blu-Ray player and unlimited rentals from Netflix I really see no reason for me to downgrade my video quality unless I really need to watch something now (which rarely happens)

That's kind of my point.  Silverlight (and their new 1080p streaming tech) is brand new but it certainly has been in development for at least a couple of years since architecture and development doesn't happen overnight.  Perhaps behind the scenes, participating in HD-DVD was just a ruse to keep the market from picking a hard standard until MS could improve their tech and more people got bandwidth...

Microsoft only went ahead and supported HD DVD because they wanted HD disc formats to fail.. they figured that if they could stall blu ray long enough their digital distribution would take off and capture the majority of the market.

Increase bandwidth cap, faster internet speed, and keep cost low or else DD will never be superior to physical media.

Ya, Microsoft has always been behind Digital Distribution. The only thing is Microsoft saw the chance to earn some money so they threw minimal support behind the format.

If I remember correctly the studios were starting to adopt HD-DVD and then Sony paid half a billion dollars to make them use blu-ray instead.

This could be true, quite honestly. MS is sneaky..they can keep secrets better than some (SONY) people. I don't see the DD being enough right now like you guys think tho. Yeah it works for DLC and arcade/psn games. But it's going to be a long time before we can expect to get nearly the same quality out of DD as we do physical format, and a long time before you can expect to be able to actually DL larger files/games/movies etc in a decent amount of time.