HD-DVD is dead. Long Live Blu-Ray!!!

And who the f*ck really cares anyway?

I am man enough to admit I was dead wrong about this. I was sure HD-DVD was going to stand victorious in the end. It was cheaper, the same quality (picture not content) as blu-ray, and the porn industry was all over it. It was VHS part deux, right?

Wrong. Porn did certainly drive VHS adoption, but the alternative in 1975 was a seedy movie theater with sticky floors. VHS *saved* porn and brought it safe and sound into the home of Joe Sixpack. In 2008, HD-DVD was a possible porn outlet, but the industry is certainly in no need of a savior. Thanks to the internet, it's a multi-billion dollar industry with plenty of outlets into the consumer's home. Pay-per-view, network cable (they fuzz out the naughty bits), websites, magazines, cell phones, and let's not forget good old fashioned standard def DVD's! This was the first flaw in my analysis.

The second has to do with customer apathy. Retails and industry experts have concluded that consumers were "confused" by the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD debate. I'm sure they were. But they also didn't give a rats ass. They still don't. Regular DVD's look great on a regular TV which most people still have. Worse yet, regular DVD's look *good* using an upconvert DVD player on an HDTV. What's that compelling reason to upgrade again?

So, in my opinion, BOTH formats will eventually fail. Blu-Ray just had more short-term life support. In the end, on-demand internet streaming will put the final nail in the next-gen DVD player's coffin.

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October 18, 2019 at 4:34 PM
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