There has been future debate as to whether Blu-ray is truly the future of high-def entertainment. Blu-ray was in competition with the HD-DVD format in a battle termed by the media and other pundits as the “Format War”. In January 2008, HD-DVD was dropped by all major Hollywood studios and Toshiba and other HD-DVD player producers decided to stop making any more HD-DVD players. This format war lasted from around 2005-2008 and cost billions of dollars for both sides. The major contributing force behind the success of Blu-ray was the decision of Sony to include a Blu-ray drive for their upcoming Playstation 3. However, that success came at a costly price because as of this very day, the company has lost more than $3 billion in terms of hardware sales and software for games were slowed down or completely scrapped due to difficulty in developing for Blu-ray.

The major question facing Blu-ray and the entire HD industry is whether their technology will last more than five to ten years. Many people are still adopting DVDs in record numbers and now that HD televisions are becoming increasingly inexpensive, many people are beginning to upscale their DVD playback options to 1080i. In fact, if you compare a Blu-ray movie on an 1080p HD television with a DVD movie, you can hardly decipher the differences in terms of visual playback. There are also very expensive costs to switch to Blu-ray and HD DVD because you must acquire a high-definition television that outputs at least on a 720p scale to a 1080p scale that also has an HDMI port and an HDMI cable. These usually retail from $600 to almost $2,000, but I boldly predict that by the end of 2010, a 1080p high definition could retail as low as $1,000.

There is also another huge factor working against Blu-ray and that is the ability to download HD videos via a digital download service. I have recently made the switch to downloading various video files that I find using many torrent sites. I know that many perceive this as an “illegal” act, but I feel that it is justified because of the exorbitant high prices that many music studios and movie studios charge for. In my opinion, if they wished to somehow sway modders, hackers, and torrent users from acquiring their work for free, they should lower the prices. I know that they may lose out on more cash and create a sales deficit, but they are already experiencing sales deficits as of this day. Also, the financial benefits for myself is that I can just simply buy a 500 gigabyte external hard drive for about $100 and then go on ahead and stream my videos either through a ROKU box or even the Xbox 360 or the PS3.

However, there are some downsides to the digital downloads idea. The first problem is that HD content can take up a lot of hard drive space and it seems unlikely that internet providers have enough bandwidth to allow for such a large amount of video downloads. Also, in order to stream videos, you must have either a wifi connection or a DSL or cable modem connection that has download speeds of 100Mbps. Also, many people are also aware of the DRM (Digital Rights Management) that restricts what you can do with the content. Once you download an HD video, like on Xbox Live, or from the Apple Store, you are restricted to playing that file on that computer that the file resides on. If you transfer the file to another computer or storage device, it shall cease to work.

In my opinion, I really do not care whoever wins this format war because I have already taken the next step in order to attain the best entertainment I perceive to be best for me in terms of economics and convenience. I have tied my entertainment futures to acquiring digital entertainment via downloadable content that I refuse to pay for. Eventually, I shall own both an optical media disc, like Blu-ray, and my hard drive streaming videos to my ROKU box, but for now, I recommend acquiring digital content at a lesser cost and if you can afford to invest in high definition television, then do so.

• Blu-ray
• High Definition
• 1080p TV

1. Hard drive
2. HDMI
3. Digital Downloads