Originally posted by: lordjedi

Originally posted by: Tiptup
I hope that's true. Neither format truly excites me, but if I'm going to be stuck with one, Blu-ray is technically better and I'd rather have that dominate. It may come with more copy-protection crap, but that will still be bypassed quickly (I'm sure) and homemade content will be nicer on Blu-ray.

Meh. The only thing technically better about Blu-Ray is that it can hold more. Other than that, they both use the same video/audio encoding and everything else. And since it looks like (at least some) the players are backward compatible with existing DVD titles, I guess it doesn't much matter which format "wins". Still, there's a reason why neither format has really "taken off" the way they should and that's because of the competing formats. My gut tells me that until HD-DVD makes an announcement that they've really lost, your average consumer will continue to hold off. I personally have been telling people to hold off and wait for the format war to end. I can't, in good conscience, tell someone "oh just go get one of these" on the off chance that whatever one they decide to buy ends up being nothing more than an expensive paperweight.

The sooner an official announcement comes, the better.

See, I don't agree with this. Companies won't conceed defeat until the latest possible time because even though they have effectively lost the war, if they downsize and concentrate just on software they can probably sell disks for quite a while because by 2008 there will still be a decent base of HD-DVD player owners that want their investment to pay off and will still buy the small trickle of releases. Take a look at Beta--like HD-DVD it came out before VHS and initially held 100% of the format war. As soon as VHS came out VHS became more popular, and after a year or two of landslide victories had claimed roughly 75% of the market, much like Blu-Ray has done. As the mid-80's approached, the Beta market was only five or six percent. Beta was pretty much dead by 1984 but the plug was not pulled until the end of the decade really. But it would be stupid not to recommend to people by the early to mid-80's to go with VHS because it was the clear victor, and consumers were becoming more aware of it; Beta was unpopular. And thats the way its going now. Consumers are aware of whats going on--I mean they are the ones responsible for the landslide Blu-Ray sales! And while this is on early-adopters, the dissappearance of HD-DVD from stores pretty much would seal the deal to anyone looking into the matter--when you see Blu-Ray everywhere, and HD-DVD only in a few stores with this little tiny pathetic section its not like thats going to make you question your decision. Word on the street is basically "so this Blu-Ray is the new thing now, huh?"

Looking at the stats, there's really no way that HD-DVD can bounce back. One theory states that the format war was actually instigated by Microsoft for the very reason of creating confusion. It's not that they want Blu-Ray to die or HD-DVD to win, they are more interested in crippling the market so that people will resist HD disk content and move directly to digital downloads. A lot of industry insiders believed that the whole format war was a sort of investment scheme engineered by Microsoft in order to strengthen their own target marketplace. Their statements and flagrantly illogical business practices certainly suggest so.