I’m just going to say this here for posterity, so I can link back to it in a few years.

Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are going to bomb, people. Not as badly as UMD, though that should give you an idea what we’re dealing with. One or both will hobble on for a while as a high-end videophile format; there’s a hole to fill, now that laserdisc’s gone away. As a mass format, though, DVD’s not budging. Not so long as most people don’t even know if they’re watching a TV show in the right aspect ratio, and not so long as there’s nothing wrong with DVD.

People change their ways when they’ve damn good reason to, and not a moment before. Plain old DVD is going to stick around until it’s too unwieldy to maintain any longer — if for no other reason than that there’s too much personal and architectural investment in the format to arbitrarily pick up and switch to something that’s exactly the same except that guy you know who will scream at you for not hooking up your stereo correctly insists it’s somehow better.

For there to be a successor to a format as established and perfect, for its part, as DVD it will have to offer something so significantly different and so obviously better in just about every aspect of convenience, simplicity, and quality, that there is no comparison between the two. You create something that’s meant to be compared, and you’ve lost before you’ve begun — however nice your product in its own right. Nobody cares! At least, nobody outside the geek ghetto — and that’s the whole issue, in a nutshell.

In conclusion, Sony is fucked.