

The battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray might screw both of them - karzeem
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070906-battle-between-blu-ray-and-hd-dvd-fizzles-as-consumers-watch-and-wait.html
Interesting the way hardware standards develop in the free market.  I don't know a huge amount about this, but why wouldn't people just buy combination HD DVD/Blu-ray players?  The small extra cost seems worth it to be able to forget about who's going to win.
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mechanical_fish
As an audiophile, who might have actually been happy in an alternate universe
where HDCD and DVD-Audio were successful and low-bitrate MP3 was a market
failure... I've always thought that both HD video formats were screwed from
day one, format war or no format war. They are niche products, at best. People
(except for a few hundred thousand obsessives like myself) don't pay for audio
quality, and I doubt they'll pay for video quality either. Especially when the
"low quality" alternative is DVD, which doesn't really look that shabby if you
focus on _watching the movie_ instead of conducting A-to-B comparisons of
black levels.

Give me a $35 DVD player and Bose's marketing team, and I'll outsell any HD
player on the market. We'll mark the price up to $250, put it in a nice sleek
brushed-aluminum case, hold special Demo Events in all the Best Buy stores,
and you'll _swear_ that my player has the crispest video in the world -
because, as the quality differences become smaller, the psychological factors
become more and more significant.

The only problem with this business plan is that Steve Jobs had it figured out
_years_ ago, and he's way ahead. While the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray folks fight it
out, Steve is going to crush them by selling lower-quality video in higher-
quality boxes.

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Goladus
Film Critic James Berardinelli has been saying this for ages. He just posted
another article about it actually, and made one important point the ars
article doesn't.

<http://reelviews.net/reelthoughts/august_2007.html>

 _The problem faced by high def DVD is that consumers won't wait for the
format war to end. They'll bypass it for the Next Big Thing. That will likely
be high def downloads. At this point, there are four impediments to making
this an effective way of obtaining home video copies of movies, but all are
being addressed._

It's a mistake to assume that people are waiting to see who wins the format
war. Normal people just want to watch high-quality movies easily and
conveniently, and do not care at all what format it's in.

