HD-DVD died this week, as predicted and un-predicted by everyone's favourite rimshot analyst Rob Enderle. I suppose the iPod, iPhone, Mac, black turtle necks and alternative operating systems must surely be dying then too. Or winning. Oh whatever, it can be so hard to tell can't it!
As usual: RoughlyDrafted has the most insightful take on the event.
Personally, I've no high def disc player yet … or even somewhat geeky shamefully an HD-TV. I bought a little EyeTV Diversity for my Mac mini instead of a new screen or a digital set-top box. Time shifting has become one of my desktop's principal functions ever since and the old tube wandered off to pastures new, and friends less fortunate. A twin tuner actually lets 9pm not be the royal pain in the backside it was thanks to the BBC's insanely overlapping schedules. Actually sitting (forever waiting) in front of live stuff has become a tiring experience.
Anyway, as for how people will be buying / renting their shows and movies in years to come: obviously it's eventually going to be by downloads. But not for now, or a few years yet. You can thank laggard ISP's for that, as the Pogue does among others. (Studios … catch up!) And so it transpires that we're still in the age of the venerable DVD. A second coming pretty much as people upscale and flatscreen what used to be well intended fuzzy blobs on incompetent analogue tubes.
Yes. DVD. FTW. 4evar, and all of that. While the P2P community debate fairies on the head of a theatrical production funding pin – with all the convincing and pragmatic logic of diehard socialists and true believers of any dizzy faith – it will be DVD, quite likely in PlayStation 3's and their Blu-ray able ilk, which will stock the shelves and fund the industry. It's either that or YouTube for the moment at least.
Still: at least it's all going H.264 in the long term. I can live with that. In that I can safely care less, and not need to fork out my taxes to the proprietary owner on the good for nothing hill.
It's only a shame that Microsoft doesn't rhyme with Argentina.
