The Moonlit Path

Blu-Ray and HD DVD have been striving for dominance as the industry standard in the high-definition home market for two years now. With recent announcements from the Time Warner Company, Blockbuster, BestBuy, WalMart and Netflix to solely back Blu-Ray, the fate of the HD DVD format was slowly but surely being decided.

For many of us, the format war not only was the battle for the best high-definition standard, but was also one of the deciding functionalities that gave weight between two major video game consoles: Sony's Playstation 3, which offered a built in Blu-Ray player, and Microsoft's Xbox 360, with an option to buy an HD DVD add-on.

Earlier today, Toshiba (the main force behind HD DVD,) delivered the fatal blow by admitting defeat and announcing that they will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. The last three major movie studios who currently support HD-DVD--Universal, Paramount and Dreamworks Animation--are expected to follow suit and announce their support for Blu-Ray sometime within the next few weeks.

Now that the war is over, consumers who are looking to buy next-generation hardware and software can now do so without getting frustrated or confused. While Blu-Ray has reigned triumphant in this long, drawn out format war, the question remains: "When will content downloads do away with the need for any kind of disc altogether as mp3's and other formats are slowly doing with the Compact Disc standard?" While I doubt that will happen anytime soon considering the size of such a file would tremendously bog down a connection, that in itself is another story. Until then, hooray for Blu-Ray, Sony and the PlayStation 3!