Switched

Wondering whether to go with Blu-ray or HD-DVD? The decision is pretty clear, if the lightning fast drama and events over the past few days at CES are any indication.

First, last Friday, Warner Bros. announced it was switching its exclusive deal for next-gen disc availability of its movies (everything from 'The Matrix' to 'Lord of the RIngs') from HD-DVD to Blu-ray. This was enough to get the pundits, speculators, and naysayers foaming at the mouth with pronouncements that Blu-ray could well have won the war of next-gen, HD-quality disc formats.

Then, on Sunday, the HD-DVD group cancelled its CES press conference and event. Rather than spinning the Warner Bros. news with a smiling, confident face, the HD-DVD camp basically surrendered the public relations war, which leads us to believe that either it was totally caught off guard and suddenly had no press announcement at the 11th hour. It certainly was a tough position to be in, but at least Toshiba's VP of DVD marketing, Jody Sally kept a strong front by saying "HD-DVD is not dead," at a press conference on Sunday. (Toshiba was one of the major investors behind the HD-DVD format.) Not a bad strategy considering that company just released some hot new Qosmio laptops with the world's first rewriteable HD-DVD drive, among other features.

Still, the rumors have kept on flying, from naysayings by 'Transformers' director Michael Bay to word that Target may soon start selling only Blu-ray discs.

Now the Financial Times is saying that Paramount may be bowing out of its commitments to HD-DVD, which makes it the last major studio to move over to the other side. Until this latest news broke, early pronouncements of HD-DVD's demise may have seemed a bit premature, but now all those early naysayers seem to have been right on the money.

Yesterday, we took images of the adjoining booths on the show floor. As you can see, the Blu-ray booth was flooded with visitors, while the HD-DVD booth was relatively sleepy (giving its workers time to work on their resumes, no doubt).

So, what does this mean for you? Well, if you recently bought (or received) one of those $199 HD-DVD players that were for sale everywhere, don't worry -- you have, in effect, a fine DVD player that will upscale regular DVDs to quasi-HDTV quality.

If you're in the market for one of these players to show off the HD capabilities of your new TV, then it's safe to say that Blu-ray is the way to go. Plenty of new Blu-ray players (and drives and PCs) are on display at the show, and it's even rumored that Apple will announce Blu-ray drives at next week's MacWorld Expo.

And for existing owners of Blu-ray players, there's even more good news: This year some of those much touted online elements, such as Blu-ray Live, which let you download information on a movie from the Web or even play games with others over the Internet, will finally make their way onto Blu-ray discs later this year (or so says the Blu-ray disc camp).

So it seems like the battle of next-gen discs has been won by Blu-ray, but the war between the different HD-content distribution camps is far from over. In fact, it didn't look like Bill Gates, whose Microsoft was also a big supporter of HD-DVD, was phased in the least bit the other night at his last CES keynote. In fact, Gates focused on digital distribution (over the Internet) of SD and HD content from even more content partners (Showtime, ABC). In other words, he's probably thanking his lucky stars that Microsoft hedged its bets and offered HD-DVD as a separate drive for the Xbox 360 rather than built-in.

Regardless, over the last few days, HD-DVD's star has fallen about as quickly as a certain Democrat's presidential campaign, making us want to call HD-DVD the Hillary Clinton of optical disc formats (or is Hillary Clinton the HD-DVD of presidential candidates?).

Let's just hope that nobody from the HD-DVD camp jumps out of a window, because what happened to that team over the past few days was extremely harsh and sudden, the stuff of a prime-time soap, if prime-time soaps actually bothered themselves with dorky topics like movie disc formats.