The good news for consumers is that high-definition DVD prices are falling. The bad news is that the format war still isn't over. As was the case with BetaMax and VHS in videotape recorders, consumers now have to choose between incompatible formats. Personally, I'm just going to wait until the war is over. I've been through enough of these technology standard battles to instinctively avoid buying "eight track," "BetaMax," or just about anything proprietary in the consumer electronics space. Of course, I don't care enough about video to adopt early, in any case, so I might be odd in that regard.
Sony's "Blue-ray" players are selling for under $300, while Toshiba's "HD-DVD" player is available for $200.
The edge right now seems to be on Blu-ray's side. since Thanksgiving in the U.S., Blu-ray discs account for 72 percent of the high-definition discs sold, while HD-DVD has 27.4percent of the share over that same time period. So maybe Sony can win a major format war for once.
Right now, Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox and Metro Goldwyn Mayer support Blu-ray DVDs, while Universal (GE) has sided with HD-DVD. Warner Bros. supports both players.
Studios obviously hope the new format will spark higher DVD sales, which are highly profitable, but whose sales have started to slide.
We shall see. The download market and on-demand video streaming have to be taken into account, this time around. And with users opting for increased mobile or PC screen video, it isn't an absolute certainty how big the market might be for high-definition DVDs. It's great for big screen displays. But lots of viewing now takes place on all sorts of screens where the advantage is small, if much of an advantage at all. For downloaded video, in fact, less information, which means faster downloads, probably is more important.
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