When the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD format war ended some months ago, the digital media industry expected consumers to flock to the Blu-ray format.  Six months later they seem to still be waiting.

While the two high definition formats duked it out for superiority, it made sense that no one flocked to one or the other.  We here at StarterTech finally ended up going with HD-DVD… just a few months before the format died in February 2008.  While there were options for us to switch over to Blu-ray without much cost, we decided to wait to see how much it really got adopted.  According to a recent study of 1,000 people to see if they were adopting Blu-ray, it seems we aren’t the only people who are waiting to see what happens.

Perhaps it is due to needing an HDTV to play a high definition format, possibly the price point as the players are still fairly expensive, the movies are still more expensive than a standard DVD… it really can be any number of factors that are keeping it from wide adoption.  With all of this in mind, we are actually recommending to friends and family that they wait a while longer to see what happens.  The methods by which movies are delivered to our homes is changing with more and more streaming devices, downloads, portability on the iPhone and iPod Touch, it may just not be Blu-ray that fails, but physical media in general.  While there is something to be said to physically owning an item, as houses get more and more cluttered, why not eliminate physical movies all together and just go to downloads?

I don’t see this happening overnight, but I do see people using standard DVDs to carry them through to the next format beyond Blu-ray, be it physical or virtal media is still be determined.  For now, I am just thinking you are better off spending you money on a nice HDTV, upgrading to an HD receiver, or even a realtively cheap upconverting DVD player to make your standard DVDs look as nice as possible.  Blu-ray is probably never going to gain wide acceptance, so it is probably best to just hold out and wait for the industry to change everything for you.