As an audiophile, who might have actually been happy in an alternate universe where HDCD and DVD-Audio were successful and low-bitrate MP3 was a market failure... I've always thought that both HD video formats were screwed from day one, format war or no format war. They are niche products, at best. People (except for a few hundred thousand obsessives like myself) don't pay for audio quality, and I doubt they'll pay for video quality either. Especially when the "low quality" alternative is DVD, which doesn't really look that shabby if you focus on watching the movie instead of conducting A-to-B comparisons of black levels.
Give me a $35 DVD player and Bose's marketing team, and I'll outsell any HD player on the market. We'll mark the price up to $250, put it in a nice sleek brushed-aluminum case, hold special Demo Events in all the Best Buy stores, and you'll swear that my player has the crispest video in the world - because, as the quality differences become smaller, the psychological factors become more and more significant.
The only problem with this business plan is that Steve Jobs had it figured out years ago, and he's way ahead. While the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray folks fight it out, Steve is going to crush them by selling lower-quality video in higher-quality boxes.
Film Critic James Berardinelli has been saying this for ages. He just posted another article about it actually, and made one important point the ars article doesn't.
The problem faced by high def DVD is that consumers won't wait for the format war to end. They'll bypass it for the Next Big Thing. That will likely be high def downloads. At this point, there are four impediments to making this an effective way of obtaining home video copies of movies, but all are being addressed.
It's a mistake to assume that people are waiting to see who wins the format war. Normal people just want to watch high-quality movies easily and conveniently, and do not care at all what format it's in.
Give me a $35 DVD player and Bose's marketing team, and I'll outsell any HD player on the market. We'll mark the price up to $250, put it in a nice sleek brushed-aluminum case, hold special Demo Events in all the Best Buy stores, and you'll swear that my player has the crispest video in the world - because, as the quality differences become smaller, the psychological factors become more and more significant.
The only problem with this business plan is that Steve Jobs had it figured out years ago, and he's way ahead. While the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray folks fight it out, Steve is going to crush them by selling lower-quality video in higher-quality boxes.