HD wars over

It seems a small part of the world came to its senses while I was away, namely the HD war finally being over with Blu-Ray coming out on top.

This is, of course, “a good thing”. Nothing beats competing standards to constrain and confuse the market. Ultimately consumers want simplicity and convenience. With this over everybody wins, and I am sure that Toshiba can carve out a good piece of the Blu-Ray player business.

I suspect that this shift on their part was due to the realization that in the long-term the real threat to Blu-Ray/HD-DVD is online distribution and that a protracted format war would only have sped up the consumer’s shift to that as a means of delivery at the expense of shiny discs.