Is the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD format war almost over?
Best Buy and Netflix have both just announced that they will be promoting Blu-ray over HD DVD.
That comes on the heels of last month’s announcement by Warner Bros. that they will stop selling HD DVDs and sell only Blu-ray disks in the future. It just so happens that Warner Bros. is Hollywood’s biggest seller of DVDs. Blockbuster had already said that they would only rent Blu-ray disks in the brick-and-mortar stores, while making both formats available for their online customers.
It’s too bad format wars like this end with the early adopters of the losing format getting screwed and stuck with obsolete hardware and media. Hopefully the industry standardization will bring the prices of Blu-ray players down, as they are currently much higher than the HD DVD players from Toshiba. My brief price research shows that you can get a 1080p HD player for $200, while a 1080p Blu-ray player is $350-400. Also, with HD DVD you can opt for a 720p HD DVD player for around $150.
Time to get a PS3?
Update: Toshiba waves the white flag of surrender.
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Chris Moran
I wrote about this recently here and I think the big underdog here is online viewing. With Apple TV upgrading to streaming HD content and Netflix having the “Watch Now” function I think as more users get broadband the ultimate win for consumers will be in having to choose neither format and view it all online at a lower cost of entry.
The biggest problems with streaming movies is the lack of portability of downloaded content and some have limited viewing time restrictions.
I have heard positive remarks from some friends of mine who use the Netflix online viewing option.
I agree that online content providers like YouTube and Apple TV is the way of the future, it’s just a question of how long it will take for that to happen.