HD DVD is dead

For those who may be new readers to ybpguide, one of the first posts I made back in October of 2006 was about the high-definition format war between Toshiba’s HD-DVD and Sony’s Blu-ray. Basically, the two companies decided to take visual and audio home entertainment into a new realm and create a medium that would allow richer, digital audio, more-interactive movies, and expanded storage for optical media.

I sided with the HD DVD camp thinking that the average consumer would identify more with the term ‘HD DVD’, ultimately recognizing that the next step up with your HDTV and HD audio would be (naturally) HD DVD. Well, I was wrong. The decisive factor when these two formats squared off was all about content. HD DVD had the upper-hand in price, but Blu-ray was able to secure more movie studios and more commercial outlets to back their technology. For awhile, some movie studios agreed to produce their films in both formats, trying not to choose sides.

Another Trojan horse that proved to be very effective in ultimately winning the war was Sony’s clever decision to make their video game console, the Playstation 3, a default Blu-ray player. Since most avid gamers tend to pick up the latest and greatest anyway, having the additional feature of being able to play Blu-ray movies proved to be a hot commodity. With the rival Microsoft Xbox 360, you had to purchase a HD DVD add-on.

Well, now my HD DVD player will soon run out of HD DVD movies to play. The only consolation is I only paid $100 bucks for it on Amazon and that it can still up-convert my regular DVD’s. It may stay in the bedroom and be confined to ‘the bedroom tv’, but alas, Blu-ray and Sony are here to stay.

[read: money.cnn.com, pic: engadget]