This is something that came up this weekend as we got got my Papa (nee father-in-law) a home theater for his 60th birthday. We got talking about Blue-ray and HD-DVD, why to buy a PS3 (only if Blue-ray wins out so completely, but looking at what happened to Beta and now Memory Stick, I’m of the mind that it’s not going to happen) and does any of this matter anymore.
I read about the combined players a few months ago (Engadget, Xbit), but C|Net’s Gadget Blog posted today that the two platforms will become irrelevant perhaps as soon as 2008. Sure the formats will still be there (and because the boxes are a different size, those disc wallets may take off in popularity again) but users will be able to get their movies regardless of who owns the rights (the example I gave to help explain this is that unless HD-DVD totally wins out like VHS did, we’ll never see Spider-Man on HD-DVD).
Edit (11-9-06) It looks like Peter Chernin, the president and chief operating officer of News Corp in an interview with MacWorld on how Blue-ray will be “focused” by the PS3’s pending release commented – “Unification, if it comes, is going to be driven by the marketplace.”
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