People have inquired to me about HD-DVD for the past few years. Just this afternoon I was talking with a client who was inquiring about HD-DVD VS dvd. As I went into a bit of a lesson on DVD and HD-DVD, things became clearer for him. When I mentioned Bluray, his response was, "what's that?" He had no clue. And to be honest, LOTS of people don't.
All the techno-babble about storage capacity, yada, yada, yada doesn't mean a damn thing to them, and it shouldn't. All they, or anyone, should really care about is, "does it look good?", and "does it sound good?" That's it. And, to be honest with you, you'd be amazed at how many people think standard DVD discs are high definition resolution. Even today, an astounding number of people believe that and are amazed to learn that even higher definition formats are emerging. A common response I get from folks is, "how much clearer does it need to be?" Granted we calibrate and wire our display rooms as perfectly as we can, but it isn't anything folks can't achieve at home. For many, many people out there, DVD as it is is good enough for them. Aside from techno-geeks, which I don't really consider myself to be, all the back and forth technical minutae is all boring and meaningless to them. As I said, they care about two things, good picture and good sound. They don't want to know a damn thing about thet tech aspects of any of it.
I also wouldn't bet on optical discs going away any time soon. Consumers have invested a huge amount of money in dvd video libraries, and none of them is interested in replacing all of those titles all over again. I wager that any "revolutionary" video format would face a FORMIDABLE task in just survining, let alone dominating the market or replacing dvd. And don't throw the "dvd beat vhs" argument at me either. When VHS was king, we were a nation of renters and recorders. VERY few had voluminous video libraries. Today...just look at dvd sales figures. Hell, studios plan on dvd sales as a part of their profit model. I have over 400. At last count, my boss had over 650, and most on my staff have upwards of 50 titles or more on their shelves.
And, interestingly, when clients and "lookers" inquire about high definition video discs, they almost overwhelmingly, 99 times out of 100, refer the the technology as "HD-DVD". That's what the consumer knows, and my bet is, that's where they'll throw their support in the long run.