Bleak Future for HD-DVD?

Warner Brothers announced today that they are going Blue Ray only after May of 2008 and like a shot heard round the world Blue Ray fans pumped their fists and jumped for joy. As it seems more and more studios are moving towards Blue Ray, personally I thought just Disney and Pixar alone on the Blue Ray front was enough. Personally I own an HD-DVD player and not a Blue Ray player. Why did I get my HD-DVD player? Well Amazon had one of their really great deals and out of the twelve HD-DVD's I currently own approximately eight of them came free with that purchase. Of the other four, one is the Planet Earth set and another is a HD-DVD/DVD combo so all in all I'm not going to lose too much if HD-DVD went belly up tomorrow. I do however have over 500 DVD's, I'm not proud of that but like many people its an addiction!

So what does this mean for most people, probably nothing. The bottom line is that if you don't have a PS3 you probably don't have Blue Ray and even if you do you still may think Blue Ray (and HD-DVD for that matter) are a little bit more expensive than DVD's. I'll admit I am much more likely to rent HD-DVD than buy right now and watching DVD's still does not bother me at all. The studio's may want you to believe it but the difference between DVD and HD-DVD is NOT as big as VHS to DVD.

I'm not a fool, I pretty much knew buying the HD-DVD Player that I was buying into the side most likely to loose out, but I got a good price and some good movies. Maybe in the future I'll get a Blue Ray player or a PS3 but right now I don't feel that need to go all out High Definition DVD.

Perhaps the Warner announcement is good if in fact it does signal the end of a useless format war. But I've said it before and it warrants being said again. When the war is officially over, will anyone even care?

It also warrants being said that although I once frowned upon a time when movies would be distributed digitally and stored digitally its something that I have been exposed to recently and if I could trade my entire physical DVD collection for an identical collection stored on my PC, well that offer may be too good to pass up.

In the end you just have to enjoy what you have, if its DVD I say stay that way, if you've got Blue Ray, well today made you that much happier, but if you have HD-DVD its also not the end of the world. Just scratch off the HD part and tell people its just a DVD player!