Blu-ray Standard, Not A Done Deal.....

From what I heard a few weeks ago the major players had all decided on a common standard based on Blu-ray. Now Toshiba is saying the conversion will be cost prohibitive.

I don't want to see another Beta - VHS war again. I had friends buy those expensive Beta machines only to throw them away a few years later.

: Negotiations to reach a compromise on the standardization of next-generation DVDs could be headed for a deadlock as the group led by Toshiba has said it will be too difficult to modify the structure of their disc along the rival camp's standards.

:
www.asahi.com...

Bah. I don't want to see another medium like this period. Download and Play is the future IMHO. CDs, DVDs, HDDVD and BRDVD are just a waste of resources in my mind.

I have a lot of data that I need to back up and secure. I need to be able to carry large files around.

A 25 Gig disc would be perfect for that. I can't wait until this hits the North American market.

The kink in the waterworks of 'download and play' concept is the omission of a target resource. There should always be a way for folks to keep archives of data that is important to them, ergo I don't see cd's or dvd's going away anytime soon. One feeds the other so to speak...

We've seen this time and before every time a new physical medium leaves the arena of research and development and enters into the mainstream. Eventually someone will complain how expensive a switch over will be, failing to mention that it takes some time for people to adopt them. To me, it's nothing new...

Crysstaafur, you're ignoring the Bittorrent effect though. More and more people are choosing to "Steal" thier shows/music/movies etc rather then pay for it. This is a market opportunity to disrupt the establishment, by a smaller player, say Apple for Instance whom are starting up a Movie Download and Play service this Summer. Yahoo is also getting into the game with 79 cent song downloads.

Here is how I see the next distribution medium looking like...

www.pbs.org...

BlueRay and HDDVD will be stillborn if I get my way. Backup for files, sure. Next distrubtion medium? Only for Console lovers(and that is changing soon as well, both M$ and Sony plan on distributing content over the net with both new systems)

PS3 and XBOX360 will both feature Blu-ray!