Hold off on that HD-DVD and/or Blu-ray purchase...

Toshiba and Sony have gone to great lengths to convince you that HD-DVD and Blu-ray are both the "next big thing." With the next big thing comes the idea that it will be around forever (who would have envisioned the CD a dying format even five years ago?). Well, let's just take a step back and look at the facts. Have these formats already failed us?

Blu-ray has an immediate advantage over HD-DVD, and that is resolution. The first run of HD-DVD discs have a resolution of 720p/1080i, while Blu-ray has a 1080p standard. Toshiba's player also doesn't support the highest resolution. HD-DVD will likely match it's Sony-backed counterpart in this respect, but limping out of the gate is going to upset and confuse consumers.

Corporations have been completely unwilling to accept the fact that format wars do not sell players, and backing the wrong horse can be disastrous. Sure, Sony has survived defeats in the past (Betamax, MiniDisc), but retailer Circuit City was nearly wiped out by Divx (not the codec, but the opponent DVD handily defeated). Now, I don't think any of the big players in the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle are fighting for their lives here, but if one of these formats does win out, it won't be a pleasant task tabulating losses while designing your first "enemy" player.

When consumers bought a DVD player, they could rest easy knowing that their favorite movies would be available in the new format. Also, the discs wouldn't degrade at nearly the rate VHS tapes do. Now, consumers have to consider which studios are backing which films, and even then, they have to know which studios produced their favorite movies. Furthermore, the chances of every movie a consumer wants to see being available on the HD format they choose seem to be in the neighborhood of slim to none. These discs offer no benefit to the millions of households without an HDTV, and only a limited benefit to the millions upon millions more that don't have a set that can process and display 1080p video, which in the long run may in itself be a transitional standard. This technology is not as novel as DVDs were back in 1996. A Blu-ray disc isn't going to last any longer than a DVD, though Sony does claim they are more scratch resistant.

And then there is HDCP. Aside from the fact that most people don't know how to properly utilize HDTV, as well as the fact that HD programming is still extremely limited, there is an encryption standard in place that many content providers will require on these next-generation discs called HDCP. In essence, every part of the playback process must support HDCP to get an HD resolution. Take into account that there are currently no HDCP computer monitors on the market, any HD-DVD or Blu-ray drive in a computer will deliver only a standard definition signal on every HDCP disc. The only video cable to fully support HDCP on today's market is HDMI, something not found on the XBox 360 or on the lower version of the PlayStation 3 (which is not fully upgradeable to the premium setup like the 360). There are also non-HDCP HDTVs on the market. Many of us have seen how standard definition programming looks on an HDTV (it's a considerable downgrade from a DVD), and if we are subjected to that from our $1000 player and $25 disc, you can be sure we won't be happy. As of right now, there are very, very few people that have a video setup in their home that is capable of playing back a 1080p Blu-ray disc, even if they have the player.

And finally, the really bad news. There are bigger, badder, better technologies in development right now. We see 1080p as a relatively permanent standard, just as we have been lead to. However, there is a format in development right now called Super Hi-Vision or Ultra High Definition Video (UHDV). Essentially, it packs in sixteen times the pixels of 1080p video. Uncompressed, it takes 3.5 terabytes of storage to give us eighteen minutes of video, but as throughput expands in every medium, this may become feasible. Consumers like a hard format though, and the best we can currently do is a dual-layer 50 GB Blu-ray disc, right? Well, not quite. That eighteen minutes could be put on an optical disc, assuming that disc was a Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD). Once again, this is uncompressed. If compressed with the MPEG-4 codec, you could theoretically squeeze eleven hours of UHDV onto a single HVD. Viewers of the new standards have actually reported motion sickness because the video was so close to reality.

Now, these technologies are not mature, nor are they very close to the market. However, they are not a far away as we think. There are many proposals for much lower storage versions of the HVD to hit the market, including flash cards that take advantage of it's recording technology. Once some hurdles in development are cleared, most having to do with the polymers used in production and getting the right lasers into consumer players, this is a very viable option for data storage and media distribution. HD will be a thing of the past. And worse yet, this is not the only ultra-high storage disc in development. InPhase Technologies and Hitachi are also known to be working on advanced storage solutions. Maybe this will be HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray II, or perhaps Betamax vs. VHS V.

So, given all of this potentially new information, what reason is there to get caught up in the HD-DVD/Blu-ray fight? We are just going to do it all over again in a decade, if not sooner. It's designed obsolescence. Why should we be forced to choose any hard format? A download/streaming distribution model really makes the most sense for all parties, but we are all slow to change, corporations and consumers alike. So go out and by your Blu-ray players. Just be ready to toss them in the garbage when the next big thing rolls around.

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