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It's fun to ride this wave, even if it ultimately ends up crashing against broad consumer disinterest.



It won't. One or the other, or both, of them will survive and eventually catch on with the general public. Enough people are upgrading their TVs to sizes and capabilities that will reveal the limitation of DVDs and the advantages of HD content. Plus, as more people get HD feeds on their cable or satellite, they will want to have the same quality on their movie discs. That's what happened to me - I was wowed by HD on DirecTV and, when I saw the price drop on the Toshiba players, I got into HD-DVD last month. Now I'm thinking more seriously about getting a PS3 to get into Blu Ray as well.

These are new technologies, and the general public may not know enough about them yet. Especially when all they hear about lately in the tech-world is the iPhone. A lot of the people in the know are waiting out the format war, and others are waiting for the price of the players to come down.

Plus, many are rightfully complaining about the pending need to upgrade their movie collection for the second time. The first time, of course, was the transition from VHS to DVD.

On a related note, I had to replace my DVD player recently. It finally gave up the ghost. I got it in 1997. At that time, I had to actively search for stores that would rent DVDs. Even the ones that did would have one or two tiny displays, then the other 98% of the store was VHS.

Now I have an HD-DVD player and I'm looking for stores that rent them. As Yogi Berra said, "It's like deja vu all over again."

Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica.