Articles Editorials Blu-ray: won the battle, but lost the war? | Blu-ray: won the battle, but lost the war? |
| Written by t-readyroc | |
| Friday, 22 February 2008 | |
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Since blu-ray has officially been declared the winner of the HD disc format war, I have been looking into purchasing a blu-ray reader/writer drive for my Home Theater PC (HTPC) so that I might be able to enjoy 1080p movies at home without paying the premium for a standalone blu-ray player. If you already have an HTPC, the cost difference is actually quite worth looking into, as the combination of drive plus software will only run approximately $250 at the time of this writing. The entire time that the "format war" has been going on, the mass majority of consumers has been sitting back, content to wait out the slugfest for a winner to be declared. The problem, for blu-ray anyway, is that HD content may just be getting to users by a very different means by the time we actually do see a mass production of reasonbly-priced standalone blu-ray players hit the market. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year, which took place last monthin Las Vegas, online on-demand video turned many heads as major industry players like Sharp, Samsung, and Panasonic all jumped into the IPTV game. Like Dvorak says, "In the ideal IPTV scenario, anyone at any time can watch anything in teh entire world that is deliverable over the Internet," and this will include HD movies, when the time comes. Just consider the rabid success of video web sites like YouTube over the past few years, and you will see the connection that the article is trying to make: the future of HD delivery may be disk-less.In the end, will this deter blu-ray from becoming the next optical drive of choice? I doubt it. There's always a market for higher capacity optical drives that can be used to easily transfer large amounts of data, and DVDs have already reached their capacity. Mass delivery of HD, and indeed all television, does look to be going the way of on-demand, and the "format war" may have just made that transition that much easier. |
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