It's official Blue Ray is our Hi-Def format.

It appears it is official as we all thought would happen as a windfall from several retailers and studios backing Blue Ray. This has been a fascinating event to watch. We can learn many things from this war that will be useful in the future of the electronics industry.

We all knew that having two formats was counter productive to the consumer electronics industry. If we could have aligned with one format at the outset everyone would have benefited. I hope now that this has happened several times we can not make this mistake in the future.

On that note in the future we may not be looking at a format war but more of a codec war. Lets hope that as the industry looks digital distribution that we are not in a digital format/codec war in the future. That will take technology industry and Hollywood to for once in their life collaborate for the better good of all interested parties.

From an outside looking in perspective I think that this is again the case where the better format lost. Sony lost with BetaMax and it was the better format. I say that HD-DVD was the better format because it was dual sided and supported HD-DVD on one side and DVD on the other. This I feel has a very compelling value proposition to consumers because when they buy the disk it is backward compatible and not constrained to one location. So taking the movie to a friends house our playing in non HD-DVD player in the house is possible.

Obviosly we are already looking to the future of distribution whether movies will be rented/streamed to the home in an on-Demand fashion or people will buy them and keep them locally stored to be served up to the home remains the question.

That being said I truely hope Hollywood starts to grasp some innovative new business models that create value around motion pictures and new consumer services.

I believe Sony fought a well played game and their efforts with PS3 and Sony Pictures support is what won this battle for them.