They both will fail if they keep it up. Just another SACD vs. DVD-Audio situation. Most people are content with upconverted DVD for now. Cable and satellite will have better HD on demand eventually and it may be possible to DL HD from Apple and others next year to some sort of STB via the internet. So if HD-DVD and Blu-Ray don't get it together, they will simply be an expensive niche like laserdisc, MD, etc. The average consumer will not buy 2 players, especially one costing $1000 or more. I'd buy a second HDTV for that money.
Now if they allow hybrid players, they both win, sort of like DVD-R vs. DVD+R. No one will care which format it is, so long as it's HD and has the cool blue or red plastic on the box. That is the difference now that VHS and beta could not solve. The media is the same physical size, and there is no technical reason stopping the manufacture of an affordable multi-format player now that Ricoh and NEC have pickups and silicon to do it.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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They both will fail if they keep it up. Just another SACD vs. DVD-Audio situation. Most people are content with upconverted DVD for now. Cable and satellite will have better HD on demand eventually and it may be possible to DL HD from Apple and others next year to some sort of STB via the internet. So if HD-DVD and Blu-Ray don't get it together, they will simply be an expensive niche like laserdisc, MD, etc. The average consumer will not buy 2 players, especially one costing $1000 or more. I'd buy a second HDTV for that money.
Now if they allow hybrid players, they both win, sort of like DVD-R vs. DVD+R. No one will care which format it is, so long as it's HD and has the cool blue or red plastic on the box. That is the difference now that VHS and beta could not solve. The media is the same physical size, and there is no technical reason stopping the manufacture of an affordable multi-format player now that Ricoh and NEC have pickups and silicon to do it.