Handful of Sand Goes Blu-Ray

With pressure mounting over the past few weeks as a result of the defections of Warner, Netflix, Best Buy, and Wal-mart, Toshiba finally acknowledged this week that the slow death of HD-DVD is complete. This announcment freed Universal and Paramount to announce their support for Blu-Ray discs (here and here). Roughly Drafted has a very interesting (and very detailed) history of the format war for those so inclined. With the emergence of Blu-Ray as the HD format of choice, this should be the year when HD moves into the mainstream. DVD still has plenty of life to live, but I think this will be the year that not-so-early adopters start buying into the new media.

Not-so-early adopters like me, in fact. Last weekend's developments gave me the confidence in the new format to go out and buy a Playstation 3. Now I'm not much of a gamer in my old age, but the Playstation 3 is also reportedly one of the best, cheapest Blu-Ray players on the market. As it has WiFi built-in, firmware updates can be downloaded and installed without much hassle (it was one of the first things I did after setting up the box). Since we already had a DVD player hooked up to our Sony 40" LCD via an HDMI cable, swapping in the Playstation 3 took less than 5 minutes. After completing the onscreen set-up, I popped in the Spiderman 3 disc that came with the system, dimmed the lights, and marveled at what high-definition really means.

Now I was convinced. I hopped onto Amazon, found a 3-for-2 sale, and ordered the first twelve titles of my nascent Blu-Ray library. The most exciting: the new, 5-disc edition of Blade Runner. I am practically salivating in anticipation of watching it.

UPDATE: Via The Digital Bits, a good example of why physical media is not going to be replaced by movie downloads any time soon.