In a month when both HD-DVD and BluRay claimed initial victory in the format war, the first HD-DVD was cracked and the Apple TV was announced is the death knell sounding for video and media distribution on 12cm plastic discs?

Consumers have been on a winning run recently with DVD back-catalog prices at rock bottom and generally prices down to the old VHS days. However, it wasn't going to stay that way for long and the tech companies and media moguls are now suggesting that, not only do we have to reinvest in our old movies and purchase them at the inflated "new technology" prices, the ones we remember from the early days of DVD, but we also need to invest in a new TV and a new media player. Bring on High Definition (HD).

It's all a bit of a mess this high definition disc malarky. First off there's 2 competing formats, there's the possibility of 3 different types of discs and there's the battle lines drawn as various content distributors, software developers and hardware manufacturers face off by backing one format or the other. Quite why anyone would consider investing in HD at the moment is a mystery, and the companies pushing the technology only have themselves to blame.

HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, HD or True HD, interlaced or progressive? Add to the confusion over the formats with a super constrictive DRM copy protection scheme, which stops HD content from being played on most PC's, and you've got a rising of discontent in a unfriendly, pricey and ultimately unusable technology.

The upshot of all this is that we've been seeing solutions from technology and personal solutions designed to break the format down.

On the technology side there have been two developments designed to simplfy the formats and reduce the reliance on one or the other. The first comes from Warner Bros. and, rather simply, it is a dual format disc produced by glueing a HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disc back to back; use one side for one format and flip it over for the other. This is a big boon for consumers who don't want to risk blowing cash on a losing format, the retailers who don't want to stock 2 formats for each film and for the studios, such as Warner's themselves and Paramount, who have backed both formats and would rather not have to produce 2 discs. Against it lies the studios who have backed one format or the other, and who won't want to increase their production costs and won't want to be seen to back down to the format they didn't originally stand behind.

How about a dual format player? Well LG have just announced one and, while it does have trouble with the interactive elements of HD-DVD discs, it plays both formats natively. The downside? Well it's a bit pricey, currently $1200, but it does save the worry over investing thousands in discs that you'll be resting your coffee mug on in a years time.

So where is all this leading? The reality is that with the advent high speed internet and high speed wireless networking, video is going to go the way of music. The studios and distributors haven't just repeated the mistakes they made with music, by ignoring online distribution or seamless distribution around personal players, they've added to them by making their own distribution models wildly confusing and expensive.

This has already been brought home to roost with the cracking of the HD-DVD security. That was caused because an individual couldn't play a disc he bought on his PC so he set to work and effectively broke in to his own property. Ultimately the studios, distributors and hardware manufacturers will likely lose sales of discs and lose on the investment in the disc technologies.

With the release of new in-the-home distribution models such as Apple TV, used to move music, photo's and films from the PC to the TV wirelessly, and personal video players such as the iPod, iPhone, Microsoft Zune and Sony PSP, consumers want the freedom of playing content when and where they want. They don't want to be restricted by intrusive copy protection, physical discs or the cost of having to buy the same movie in 3 formats.

The trend is heading towards digital distribution of movies, the only thing holding it back at the moment is the relative complexity of figuring out how that will work, but it is coming. It might well be that video discs will go the way of CD's, bought but ripped straight to iTunes and never physically played, or people might just find it so easy to record TV content to their PC's and distribute it freely that they'll never need to buy video on disc again.

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