What about Sony? Should they cut their enormous losses and drop Bluray? Think of all the money that Sony has burnt in its attempts, albeit successful ones, to win the format war. It'll be a long time coming before they break even. Don't expect people to all of a sudden rush out an start buying Bluray players now that HD-DVD is officially dead. DVD still has a long life ahead of it.

Personally I think their ought to be a cheap red-laser based HD disc format that is more consumer friendly. I'm sick of Sony's formats that they force feed down people's throats.

It's sad what's lost in this whole format war. The bad guy, Sony, will likely win. Yet no-one seems to care. Instead, acting like mindless drones marching to the beat of Sony's drum, everyone is supporting another one of Sony's proprietary formats in its greedy attempts to make a little bit more money. But at what cost? Confusing and frustrating consumers to start with. But if Bluray does indeed win, this would be a rare victory for a Sony-lead format; MiniDisc, ATRAC, UMD, MemoryStick to name a few, are by in large failures. Now you could argue that creating these proprietary formats is good for Sony's business, and who are we to condemn Sony for wanting to help its bottom line? But even that can be debated, as there are plenty of people like me that refuse to buy a Sony digital camera because it can't use your otherwise perfectly fine SD flash memory cards. Sony's stubbornness to adopt MP3 and instead push ATRAC for as long as it did surely hurt its business. Regardless of whether it is a wise business move on Sony's part to create these proprietary formats, it's clearly a losing proposition for us as consumers. And Sony's Bluray is no different, as they could have easily worked with other companies to come out with a single, unified format. But instead they banked on Bluray giving them a business edge, while leaving the consumer out to dry again.

If you were to take away the decisions of the studios, and look only at the formats for consumer-friendliness, HD-DVD is the clear winner. They are both technically just as capable of delivering amazing HD picture and sound quality, yet HD-DVD is cheaper and is not riddled with as much DRM that could violate your Fair Use. Why then would anyone be as passionate about supporting Bluray as I see people are, especially given the decisions that Sony has made in the past that are a deservice to the consumer? If anything, I'd expect more people to support HD-DVD simply out of spite of Sony. The likely reason, however, is that most Bluray supporters are not truly Bluray supporters by choice, since a majority of Bluray players out there are PS3s and they simply want that $600 investment to seem all worth it (had the PS3 come with an HD-DVD player built-in I'm sure you'd find people just as passionate about protecting their $600 PS3 investment).

So for all of the people that have not jumped into the next-generation HiDef DVD format war, keep in mind that a "yeah" for HD-DVD is a kick in the nuts for Sony, and we all know that you'd only be returning the favor for all of the times they've done that to us the consumer.