New Disk May Help Stop the War

As its been at least a full day or two since my last bit of movie-related technology news, I feel its time for some more. This time around we cover the recent and somewhat heated rivalry between competing High Def DVD standards (aka the HD DVD vs Blu- Ray debate) and a new technology that may help sway the "war" to one side or the other. As highlighted by a recent New York Times article, those busy tech gurus over at Warner Bros. (who I've written about before) have done it again -- maybe.

What have they done you ask? Well, they've invented, and plan to formally announce next week, a new kind of DVD disk that can be played on either HD DVD or Blu-Ray players. So, that means all those people waiting to see which shoe drops and which format finally dominates may not need to worry about it so much anymore -- that is, if the major studios besides Warner Bros. decide to hop onboard. They might -- I guess anything is possible, right? Although, I have a feeling there might be one major holdout at least ... Sony. I can't see them giving up their real or imagined market superiority with Blu-Ray.

Really, I'm not that worried about what format will eventually win. What I think will actually happen is that consumers will wait for these competing formats to burn themselves out and not pick a clear winner. By that time, we'll probably be able to download whatever programming we want from places like the iTunes store or XBox Live instead of worrying about having the right player to play this format or that one. If the companies that started this "war" don't watch out, they might just end up fighting themselves out of business.