Bob/Richard...
I said this in another thread too-
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My biggest fear in the whole format war thing isn't Sony winning or HD DVD winning, but us losing. If two formats remain and studios are divided, then mass consumer adoption will be slow to happen if at all. That leaves the door cracked for inferior download/On Demand content that ultimately will cost more and deliver inferior quality. Granted mp3's don't cost 'more', but quality did take a hit and a lot of people don't realize it. I don't ever expect to see movie prices drop to that of mp3's so we would have a lesser quality product at a premium price, and as I said, that is my fear.
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That really is my biggest concern. We got fed up with cable, prices, content, commercials, so back in 2004 we went cable free until October of this year. I can say this with first hand experience that DVD, HD DVD, and BD is better quality than cable, even their so called 'High Definition' doesn't look as good as either HD disc format. On demand is buggy and movie selections are slim unless I want to start to do PPV on demand movies. The thing is if I like a movie, I will watch it repeatedly over the years that I own it. Some movies I may not have seen in several years, but if the mood strikes me, I can take it off the shelf and throw it in... no PPV expense and no content availability issues.
I can't speak for satelite delivery, but cable High Def isn't as good, and that is what I see as the 'replacement' format. I mentioned "ultimately it will cost more and deliver inferior quality" and I really feel that way. Some may ask 'How could it cost more? Well in just this one respect and example- We dropped cable and dish for three years. If we decided to do that again (I find myself only watching Discovery, History, and The Learning channel again, content hasn't improved much on the other channels in the past three years) and if things go to an 'on demand' type system, we'd be forced to sign up for a service again.
In the long run I don't see disc media going away though. Block Buster, Netflix, Hollywood Video would all be out of bussiness, and they aren't going to sit around and just let that happen.
I either want to see one format, or all movies on both formats. Ultimately if all movies were out on both formats, the public would decide and eventually there would be one format, but one that the consumer's truly picked.