garydale

More silliness from people who can't remember their history. BluRay is better standardized than CD or DVD ever was. It's been held up a little by the format war, but not all that much. The switch to HD TV that is just starting is going to fuel demand for HD discs in a way that other formats never got. Fairly quickly we're going to see DVDs go off the market, so people who are buying upconverting DVD players are throwing their money away. People who think that downloads are going to compete with discs are dreaming. It takes too long to download even a DVD right now. It's going to be a long time before we see any large scale HD downloading. As for future formats, you need TV sets bigger than 100" before you'll see a significant need for a new format. I think the BluRay is good for the next while. Not that we're not going to see higher-capacity disks coming out but the movie format is probably going to be stable for a while. Besides, just as BluRay doesn't stop you from playing your DVDs, any new format will be able to play BluRays as well. After all, going smaller causes problems at the retail end - too easy to steal. The 12cm disk format works because it is too large to slip into most pockets. Of course, there is the possibility that we'll switch to something radically different, but there is nothing on the horizon just yet.