1. “Features” heavily supported the studios, at the expense of the consumer. Sony (oh, I’m sorry, the “Blu-Ray Alliance”, headed mainly by Sony) knew that if they could obtain the position of a “standard” before HD took off in the market, then it wouldn’t matter how anti-consumer the format was, because it would be the only choice. The media industry, however, is a factor from day one, and of course they love Blu-Ray because it is heavily DRM-laden, much more so than HD-DVD, and has things like region-limitations, as was mentioned in the article.

2. Sony paid the studios. A lot. Much more than Toshiba. MUCH more. In the order of a few billion. When you already have the format that will let the media industry put the hammer down on how the consumer can use your product, why not take a few billion on the side, just for good measure.

3. False statistics. Sony has been throwing around numbers that have no basis in reality. They would claim X amount of Blu-Ray players sold, compared to HD-DVD players, but what they weren’t saying was that the majority of the players sold were PS3′s, and that a good chunk of the people buying the players had no intention of even necessarily using it to play Blu-Ray movies.

Say what you want, cheer if you want, but Sony bought this win, and they’re going to start trying to use it as leverage to make back ground they’ve lost (consoles) and money they spent (buying the industry). Almost every aspect of Blu-Ray is pro-industry, and anti-consumer. I don’t even care that Blu-Ray won, because the reality of the situation is that I don’t think either optical format would have caught on (HD downloads are just a year or two out on the horizon), but it sickens me to see that people are actually cheering for the less consumer-friendly format. You now see why these corporations are able to be so predatory and abusive to their consumers, because when it really matters, when there is still a chance to do something, the consumer is still too ignorant to have any influence.

2. I see. Well the price differential in manufacturing is minuscule still. If HD-DVD had won the battle, its costs would drop as well. I don’t see the PS3 as a long-term factor one way or the other.

3. We are basically saying the same thing. You can scratch a HD-DVD easier, yes. But because the surface of media is further from the surface, that scratch can be ignored or even buffed out. if a Blu-ray disc were similarly scratched, it would make it inoperable. So they developed a non-scratch coating to prevent that. I’ve never screwed up one of my DVDs so I can’t play it. I don’t think I’ll have any problem with my HD-DVDs either.

4. Long-term, I don’t believe the manufacturing cost of either format will be a factor. It will be a difference of pennies, not a primary reason to choose one over the other.

5. I couldn’t disagree with you more. When they were selling those Blu-ray players to people at Best Buy, were they telling them, “Hey, this thing won’t play all the cool features we will come out with next year?”

6. Well, we all knew that was coming. The point of the article wasn’t to compare sales, but relative technologies.

1. Home computing use is important to home AV use. More and more people are using computers for their AV system movie player, movie disk recorder, and “Ti-Vo” type recorder.

2. My comment on gaming use is that the increased disk production is eating away at initial production line changeover very quickly.

3. Again you state that HD-DVD and DVD can take more damage – which is false. Blu-ray with its anti-scratch coating can take more abuse as proven by independent testing. It does not matter that the data layer is closer to the surface because it is protected better.

4. Yes there is CURRENTLY a small edge in manufacturing cost. This small edge in pricing charged by the producers is due to initial equipment investment for Blu-ray production. HD-DVD is able to be produced with minimal line modification. The small HD-DVD edge will dissapear and reverse to be a Blu-ray edge once the initial investment is absorbed. The simple production cost (without considering initial production line conversion from DVD) is lower for Blu-ray media.

5. The Blu-ray spec changes do not matter. Early adopters got what they wanted – a High-def movie player that will continue to play new movies being released. If they wanted to link online with their home AV system they would have waited for 2.0 or purchased HD-DVD.

6. New one: Toshiba stopped production of HD-DVD players and recorders. This is now the most important consideration in what to buy.
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Likewise, both have more than enough bandwidth to maintain a perfect picture and perfect audio. Adding more speed might help in a computing environment, but it does nothing here.

Blu-ray may drop in price and may develop all the features that HD-DVD has, but that’s hardly a reason to buy a more expensive, feature-free player today, now is it?

And I vehemently dispute that “consumers” chose much of anything. Sony forced PS3 owners to buy an unneeded Blu-ray player that gave them an artificial early lead, and the major studios selected Blu-ray for their own reasons.

Consumers had very little to do with it.

In my view, the most important feature in a disc technology are storage and speed. Blu-ray has the edge on both and therefore I believe it is the best technology.

Consumers can look into the future, and they realize that eventually Blu-ray (which was released later and thus lags in price) will reach the same low price levels as HD-DVD, will have the same interactivity as HD-DVD, and in general will catch up to HD-DVD in every area. They also realize that HD-DVD will never have the advantage in storage and access speed. The latter two, however, are the most important aspects of what is essentially a storage disc.

The method you used to compare the two is flawed. You created categories for comparison but did not weigh them in importance. Features are not all created equal, and some are certainly more important than others. For a disc format I would say that storage, access speed, picture quality, audio quality, and price should be the most important, with the other ones mentioned in the article lagging significantly. Using this method, and being aware of changes in the future, you will realize that consumers did choose the right format, and the better technology did win.

Disclaimer–I do not work for Sony or Toshiba and do not own any High def player.