While many people believe that the hd dvd vs. blu-ray format war is drawing to an end, this appears to be far from the case.  No matter which side of the battle you happen to land on, the format war is helping you whether or not you realize it.

I’ve seen comments by blu-ray supporters that go something like “now that the format war is over, blu-ray players can come down in price!” I challenge you to name a technology that came down in price without good competition.  If Toshiba surrenders tomorrow Sony and the rest of the blu-ray camp will have no good reason to make the players more affordable.  Since hardware prices have dropped so much recently it is obvious that this competition is currently working.  In the end I believe that we do indeed need one format for HD movies to become mainstream and eventually replace DVD, but for now I welcome the competition.  The recent player price reduction by Toshiba puts these players well into the realm of affordable.   If this doesn’t spur further price reductions for blu-ray hardware I don’t know what will.  Prices will continue to decrease over time, but if they hope to eventually replace the DVD market they have a long way to go.

High Def Man is on the HD DVD side at the moment, refusing to buy a blu-ray player until profile 2.0 (aka hd dvd feature equivalent) hardware is available and affordable.  The recent Warner announcement certainly put a damper on HD DVD’s spirits, and caused many potential buyers to put off making their purchase.  That seems to be wearing off however.  A quick glance at the Amazon top selling dvd players list shows that both HD-A3 and HD-A30 are outselling any blu-ray player. It has been that way for nearly a week since I noticed, so I’d say that the Toshiba price reduction has certainly offset the Warner defection.

Another way in which the format war is good for us all is the movies!  For a while there it looked as though HD DVD was going to pass up blu-ray for number of movies released.  They never did quite catch up and with the Warner change there’s little chance that will happen.  Without the 2 camps competing the releases may have been even slower than they were.  Nothing will turn off potential customers quite like looking at the list of available movies (on either format) and realizing that there aren’t enough movies available that they’d buy in order to justify the price of a new player.

Many folks say “just by a PS3 if you want a blu-ray player!”  However the PS3 isn’t a movie player any more than the xbox360 is an hd dvd player.  The PS3 can’t be powered on/off via remote control (since it requires an IR adaptor to be connected to use a standard remote), which makes it fun for a dorm room where the player is 6 feet away but lame for a real home theater.  If it works for you that’s great, but it doesn’t cut it for High Def Man.

This isn’t going to get any less ugly any time soon.  Neither side is going to give up. By the time a clear winner has been determined the technology and players will be mature enough for normal people (normal people don’t want to update firmware or mess around with HDMI connections that don’t ‘just work’).  In the meantime we can all sit back and laugh at the names people call the people on the other side of the war.

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