And the winner is…
NOT HD DVD!!! It’s been a long time, but here I was talking about the format war of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD back in October of 2005. It’s been a long and drawn out fight, but Blu-Ray appears to be the winner.
Microsoft is being all nonchalant about it saying “We do not believe the recent reports about HD DVD will have any material impact on the Xbox 360 platform or our position in the marketplace,” as reported by eWeek.
You know they’ve got to change their drawers. They picked the losing side. I’ve got to admit, even though I thought Blu-Ray was the better technology, I still figured HD-DVD would win just because they were cheaper. Microsoft apparently thought so too in order to include the players for their Xbox consoles.
I’m still in no rush to go out and buy a Blu-Ray player yet. I watch all my HD movies either with Pay-Per-View or Apple TV rentals. It’s not often that I want to watch an older movie. I would only use a Blu-Ray player to watch new releases. That just kind of follows right? You can put older movies on to Blu-Ray, but they won’t be in real HD because the originals weren’t. They just upscale the signal.
If cable companies have their way, they may end up charging us for our download capacity. Then it may end up being cheaper for me to rent movies on Blu-Ray than it would be to download rentals.