http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/02/hd-dvd-death-ma.html
Pay very close attention to this sentence:
“This leaves Blu-Ray as the presumptive victor in the irrelevant optical disk format war. It now must face up to the real competition: the continuing success of DVD and the growing popularity of downloads, both on the internet and on-demand cable TV.”
Someday packaged media will be irrelevant. It will be a relic of the completists and obsessive compulsives. One day, everything you own, except clothes, will be virtual… somewhere on the internet and what you buy when you purchase is the right to access that source.
Packaged media, like the CD, is dead, thanks to the ipod and mp3. Movies and Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be the same.
Anybody remember Divx? It was a format that Circuit City championed competing with DVD where you buy a movie and throw it away after a couple of viewings. Well Divx has resurfaced as Xvid (Divx spelled backwards, get it?) – a well known codec for .avi files which is what everyone uses to format their movies for downloading.