who cares?
seriously, when DVD came out, the first rounds of players were obsolete not even 2 years later when "Dual Layer" discs came out. Everyone paid hundreds of dollars for players that couldn't play newer discs. (They'd freeze, skip, audio would fall out of sync) and had to buy all new players. Firmware updates! ha! BR is clunky on the back end, and I am betting something similiar will happen to make the experience better as it happened with DVD. Though I think this time, discs will play in the future ok, but I'm betting early adopters will find later hardware offerings cheaper and more feature rich than theirs. (Just size of the player alone shrinking. Sorry, but those players are bulbous.)
And DVD was $30 a disc when it came out. It took years for production costs of the discs to drop. HD-DVD required no changes to manufacturing faciliites, where as BR needs all new everything to be produced, which will keep the cost up much longer than HD-DVD would have.
Winner or not, except for the foolishly die harded (and no offense meant, but early adoption of this kind of thing is foolhardy. In a year or 2 the players and discs will DROP BIG in price) no one will buy into this until its priced like DVD is now. 90% of America finds DVD fine for their needs and will upgrade in time when their current players wear out and a Blue Ray player is $100 with $20 new releases and bargain bins.
Come on. People love diving in the 2 for and 3 for bins at sprawl-mart.
HD-DVD would have risen to a consumer friendly price point extremely fast. The BR manufacturing process is uber expensive. As a result of this, it won't be for several years unless studios and hardware makers eat cost somehwere to jump start the format, and historically (Cassette, Laser Disc, CD, VHS, DVD) they have never done this. Ever.
For blu ray fanboys, gratz. For the rest of the world, come over to watch from BRD in a few years.
For the storage happy, (and storage was BR's only really achievement over HD-DVD), no one will ever use it. Other media is already larger in capacity and more convenient. I can imagine sitting for hours while it writes to a disk, as I'm sure the write times will be s-l-o-w on the first rounds of consumer level burners. Again, more technology that will be outdated quickly and need to be swapped out. And yet another more cost focused bonus to HD-DVD as the burning technology would have probably fell to a fair price point faster.
I really think if not for the PS3, this could have gone on longer, so I'm glad that everyone can get on with it. But I just think this was not a real win for consumers on a more broad level.
TV.
