Audioholics.com have an interesting article ’10 Reasons why HD DVD Formats have Already Failed’, listing reasons why neither of the HD-DVD or BluRay DVD formats will succeed, and why the author thinks they are already dead in the water, making comparisons with the much hyped SuperAudioCD and DVD-Audio DVD formats which never reached mainstream despite both having vastly superior audio quality.
The author makes some good points. The only one I am not completely sold on is the point about the PS3 will not help sell BluRay because it includes a BLuRay DVD player. I believe this will be a significant selling point, and as history has shown with the PS2 – many PS2 when it was originally launched were sold because it was the cheapest DVD player available at the time – for your money you got a state of the art game console plus a DVD player for cheaper than any comparable DVD players that were available at the same time.
The author does make good points though. Technology for technology sake does not sell products – there has to be a significant selling point for the average consumer to invest in this new technology.
This article describes how Toshiba is still looking to work with Sony and Panasonic to work on a unified next-gen DVD format, but in the meantime the two incompatible and competing fortmats, HD-DVD and BluRay DVD will still be hitting the streets first.