There’s a big industry war over the two competing new formats for high definition DVD’s: HD DVD and Blu-ray. In the fight, there is Microsoft,Toshiba and NBC Universal in the HD DVD camp and Sony and leading content providers on the Blue-ray side.
It’s not just for the DVD format in your living room player, but in your laptop as well. Toshiba announced an under $1000 laptop with and HD DVD player. Gizmodo wonders if this will be the Blu-ray "killer." Laptops from Dell and Sony have Blue-ray players.
To understand the format showdown and its implications, I was in Cambridge a couple weeks back where I interviewed Forrester’s J.D. Gownder, one of the industry’s top PC industry analysts. He recently released a study on the "bloody" format war.
He told me that the images of both formats are superb, the big difference is price, with Blu-ray players costing about twice as much as HD DVD players. We’ll see how this plays out.
You can grab the code for this video right here.
— Andy Plesser
