I still believe that the war is bad. Dont get me wrong, I'm not a fanboy and I love the price-drop and new features of competition BUT:

If one side loses, the early and other major adopters of that side would be huge problem. Anyone remember the Beta Vs VHS war? I know people who bought a lot of movies for Beta in its prime but after it lost were forced to buy most of them for the winning VHS. Lower price and better tech are good but nothing can cure the pain and wound having having an incomplete collection of movies on a lost format that wont get new films.

Now that the both formats have enough tech and better price, I seriously hope a winner emerges soon or at least some kind of assurance that they can co-exist until next-gen formats come (If they come).

zzzz who cares this is not even gaming news.

New tech comes & goes & we all rebuy our movie collections over & over & over. By the time BluRay or HD-DVD players & discs reach mass market appeal & pricepoints, another new format will take it's place - like perhaps HVD or DLC. And then we all buy our movie collection over again ....

what gets me is that people know that digital distribution is the direction things are going. MS knows it, Sony knows it, its just many of you that refuse a believe it.Phil Harrison said he'd be surprised if the Ps3 has a physical disc drive, WHY? because he know the direction things are going. they would rather put in a 500 gb HDD an be done with it, instead of fighting with blue laser shortages an the crap that comes with it(remember the DISC READ ERROR from the PS2 days)then you guys keep talking about downloading huge amounts of data. if they wanted to you wouldnt have to download anything but a small access file or maybe a gig of game info an thats it!! the game is on a huge SERVER, you buy the game download the access key an it lets you play the game FROM THERE SERVER. how do you think comcast can put all those movies on the service for people to use. so content ON DEMAND will be here before you know it. plus its not all as bad as it may seem. it might just LOWER the price of games because publishers dont have to pay for PRINTING LABLES, PACKAGING AN SHIPPING MILLIONS OF COPIES OF GAMES!!

http://www.1up.com/do/newsS...

http://playstation3.wordpre...

"Microsoft is planning to expand their successful XBOX Live Marketplace Worldwide to countries including Canada to provide HDTV and Movie downloads. Will they be able to carry out the service worldwide?"

"Xbox LIVE is the first and most comprehensive unified online entertainment network seamlessly integrated throughout the entire console experience, making it easy for people to find the friends, games and entertainment they want from the moment they power on their Xbox 360 system. Xbox LIVE connects millions of members across 25 countries to enjoy hundreds of multiplayer games, downloadable games via Xbox LIVE Arcade, free and premium playable game demos, music videos, TV shows and movies in the United States as well as new game levels, characters and vehicles for all their favorite retail games. More information can be found online at http://www.xbox.com/en-us/l...

http://money.cnn.com/news/n... RUN AND HIDE disc lovers ther is a new sherriff in town and it's name is DLC. Goodbye scratch on purpose to force you to buy another copy disc format I WON"T MISS YOU, goodbye goodbye goodbye.

I no longer have to spend $10 on gas and drive 5 miles away to deal with a pimply faced teenager that hasn't learned how to use a cash register yet and hates his job anyway, while having to smell the bad odor from the guy in front of me because he dont bath.

Goodbye, I no longer have to buy a box wraped in sticky tape that breaks the plastic case when you try and remove the DVD from it's protective seal, Goodbye. Goodbye, I don't need to spend extra money on a HD DVD player or a Blu-Ray players to view the same HD movie when all I need is a 360 and a Live account. goodbye good riddance and don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out :-)

So I don't know why some people are yelling "Screw these formats! DLC all the way baby!" I can see why Universal supporting Blu-ray would lead to HD-DVD falling apart though. Blu-ray is probably going to be around for at least 15 years though, and possibly longer. It supports up to 200GB, and 1080p is the highest HD resolution that the industry wants to/can support. ILM did a lot of research into HD resolutions, and they concluded (back in 1996 I think) that any resolution higher than 1080p has no significant increase in percieved detail.

DLC is good for small things like movie trailers, tv episodes, and additional game content, and until we get 2TB hard drives as standard and can download at Gigabit standards Blu-ray will have no feasible competition.

Jason my friend no hard feelings but you must be Amish...Catch up my friend...I know new technology is pricey but please don't try and stick up for outdated stuff. We all here at N4g would like to start a bake sale so you can get some new stuff

I can't emphasize enough though...broadband is growing exponentially. Storage is becoming bigger and cheaper. With that technology getting into more and more people's homes, and with DOCSIS 3.0 just around the corner, it's going to allow massive file downloads in very short periods of time. Fiber to the home is a reality with companies like Verizon, and cable MSO's are starting to implement that strategy as well. I know it's not going to take over overnight, but I firmly believe that's the ultimate direction things are moving. Below is an interesting article on the subject.

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/techno...

Unless you own an XBOX 360 or a PS3, how else do you download movies to watch on your TV? From your computer? For now, I think Blu ray or HD DVD is still needed. Even when digital distribution takes over, I still think there will be some room for disc format.

You grab a movie toss it in the player. Watch the movie. ENJOY. Two hours later your turn the TV off when the movies is over. Go to bed.

Nope I have never wasted my time on watching all those silly extras like how they did and what not. Please I rather move on to other things or just prefer to pop another disc in and watch me some more movies.

Go watch a movie at a cinema and see how many people actually stay till the end to watch the bloopers reel?

Extra features are a novelty and very small group of people care about it.

Here’s a snippet from IGN’s perfect review of ‘300’ on HD DVD:

"This is one incredibly strong and distinctly Spartan collection of extras and well worth following into battle.

Score: 10 out of 10

We could easily use 300 words to describe this gorgeous, benchmark HD DVD, but we'll only use three in conclusion: Buy…It…Now…"

I really dont care one bit. They will both be another Laser Disk.
Dvd will survive both of them.

One of these two formats will win and that format will last at least 10 years.

And the reason I believe this is because not everyone is hooked up to the internet, much less high speed internet access which is needed for downloads.

Here is the very important point I want to make.

There is a huge chunk of the population that will wait to adopt the new format, whatever one that ends up winning, simply because they cant afford it just yet. I am talking about the lower middle class. Do you realize how big that group of people actually is? The lower middle class that can't afford the fancy HDTV and the fancy HD player just yet.

They will still be buying standard DVD's for the next 5 years just waiting for the price of HDTV's and HD players to come down. Then they will buy into it.

If you believe the lower middle class is ready for down-loadable content at this point in time you are wrong.

This is the reason the format war is going on.
The winner really will make a huge profit in the next 10 years.

If the industry just dropped the disc format to go with DLC they would wipe out a third to a half of their profits because thats about how many people would no longer be able to buy them simply because they can't afford it yet.

hm. this article is lame.

I have both formats (HD-A1) and a PS3. I like to see both formats stick around and keep each other in a check in balance. For one it will keep driving the prices down and each generation of players will add more features. It is to bad that all studios couldn't stay neutral and let the consumers decide on which player to buy. If we have 3 systems for games, why not 2 players for movies?

At least it wasn't to expensive in getting into the new technology. I got into both for $1,000 which is the same price for just a DVD player back in 1997. I'll take 2 for 1 any day.

Of course DLC from Xbox Live! is in 720p! It's made that may to hit a great mdeium between quality and file size. 1080p would be defeating the purpose of online distribution, since its a compressed format. And yeah, most of them have only 1 audio stream, although 2 are not technically impossible. Thing is, DLC has already taken hold of the market, and did so long before these consoles were even thought of.

Don't you guys ever remeber the battle that was CD vs MP3 player? Well, who won THAT war? You can still buy CDs, and its great for a home selection, but times have changed and the hardware currently out there permits users and viewers to make a choice in physical media (opitcal discs, flash memory) or locally stored DLC (HDD). And since pretty much every teenager out there chose mp3 for its portability, people are going to chose DLC for its

1: incredibley easy distibution (through the internet, live! and p2p)
2: ability to be accepted via external players (much like Portable Media Devices, such as iPod and Zune) for home to on-the-go playback
3: Does anyone still use a camera that doesn't use connectivity to a PC, flash or any other means of storage?
4: maleability, meaning editable content, since you can take any supported movie format and put it in Movie Maker or whatever and presto! User created content.

In short, DLC is not an undecided factor, it's already mainstream. Every trailer you download pasically proves that! And just as mp3 (and its many variations) surpassed CD, mpeg2 and 4 will have surpassed both DVD, HD-DVD AND Blu-Ray!

CD cam in in 1986 and became more prominant between 91 to 99. It was officially announced its successor DVD in 1996. DVD became affordable in 1999, and hit its peak between 2000 to now. In 2003-4 it was announced its successor, the Blu-Ray. But its real launch you could say coincided with the release of the PlayStation 3 in 2006, much like the impact PS2 had on DVD's future back in 2000-1. Blu-Ray has been floating around for while in the news and although its available now, probably won't become affordable until 2k8 and mainstream by 2k10. And that goes for HD-DVD as well.

The thing to note is that DVD didn't realy have a competitor. Maybe VCD, but that didn't stretch out further than Asia, in terms of acceptance. So DVD always ended up being compared with VHS, which was generationaly incompatible. So DVD took hold because of lack of competition.

But was that a BAD THING? I think most would agree with me when I say that in the years it took for DVD to reach where it is now, people didn't have this sort of split between formats.

My take is this: let Blu-Ray take over, for the sake of fewer headaches, and MS should chose now who is goes with. If HD-DVD, that's quite alright, as long as they don't try to tie in the whole movie aspect, and simply chose chose it to maintain "disc incompatibility" with Sony's PS3, thereby still defining a line between the two. It's okay for Blu-Ray to be the winner, and vice versa for HD-DVD, though it's be hard for Sony to re-engineer the PS3s. Right now, believe it or not MS has that flexibility. So there's no real losers!

Buy a machine that plays both formats - end of story.