Blu Ray is just not catching on like Sony hoped it would. They won the format war and decided to charge far too much for most people. Another proprietary debacle for the company that has tried and failed at it many times before.
In the mean time, the Chinese have adopted and are running with HD DVD, selling them for much less and gaining much wider adoption than Blu Ray is.
The difference between Blu Ray and HD DVD is minimal. If HD DVD returns at an acceptable price, it is going to give Blu Ray a run for its money.
Given the choice, I would rather not pay for a Blu Ray drive, I've found downloading HD content works better for me than purchasing $35 BRay discs.
It's widely expected that content delivery is going to be achieved through the internet anyway, so it would make more sense to go with the cheaper option.
So many falsehoods ... where to start.
Okay, a BD player, right now, that is profile 2.0 compliant can be had at Best Buy (a major US chain) for $98. That's not much more expensive than a DVD player.
Movies don't cost $35. The last several titles I purchased cost under $10 and were major releases (Casino Royale, etc). Even my preorder for the classic Gladiator is only $22.95 from Amazon with free shipping and that is considered a MAJOR re-release of a huge film. I routinely pick up brand new releases for under $25 shipped.
It's well worth it for me to pay a few dollars more than the DVD to get the better quality of BD. If you check you will see that iTunes downloads, which you seem to be championing often cost
as much or more as the movie on BD. The difference being that when you buy the Blu-ray movie you actually own it. When you download it on iTunes you simply have a version of the movie that won't play on anything else.
You are completely off target on price. Keep it up and I'll start posting links that show how foolish you are being. The only way downloads are cheaper is if they are illegal ones such as downloading Blu-ray rips through Bit Torrent.
As far as your assertion that HD DVD is catching on in China, Americans (and Europeans and the Japanese) simply don't care. HD DVD is dead here.
More importantly, the studios don't want to deal with China because piracy is rampant. No one wants to buy a movie in China, they want to buy an illegal knock off burned in crappy quality that they picked up at out on the street for $2.
It was recently estimated that US companies are losing over $47B a year to piracy in China and India. Microsoft recently announced that they can't make money in the Chinese market because piracy is common place, accepted, and there is no copyright enforcement.
So, ya, HD DVD can do as much as it wants in China it will have no impact in the Western world.
