Due to the announcements yesterday that Netflix and Best Buy are dedicating their HD operations to Blu-Ray, this appears to be the final nail in the coffin for HD-DVD.

However, I pose the question, who really decided this “war” was over? Was it the same company that brought Blu-Ray to the market when it wasn’t ready to compete with HD-DVD. The same company that bet it’s game console could sway the market? I bet it’s purely coincidence that they are the company that owns two movie studios, developed Blu-Ray, and manufacture the only “player they would recommend, due to upcoming changes to the platform. But Pioneer, Samsung, Panasonic and Sony have all been selling standalone Blu-ray players to customers, a representative at the Blu-ray booth at CES said.”

I may be bitter because I bought an HD-DVD player. I’m still holding out for the firesales on HD-DVD discs to pick a few more up. I also think Blu-Ray early adopters are bitter, and we might see more suits as the whole Profile 2.0 event happens later this year; which will effectively render all stand-alone Blu-Ray players incompatible with the completed feature set of Blu-Ray 2.0. Might I add that Profile 2.0 adds no features over what HD-DVD offers today, and in fact merely gets Blu-Ray to the same feature set HD-DVD has offered since it hit market.

High-definition video discs accounted for $300 million of 2007’s $23.7 billion home video market, but high definition represents the future. In its first two years, high-def players are outselling the DVD player in its first two years.

Blu-Ray also accounted for 62% of the disc sales, versus 38% for HD-DVD. One has to wonder if the weak software library of the Playstation 3 (which accounted for an additional 3.25 million Blu-Ray players on the market) had anything to do with skewing disc sales. I know if I had spent money on a Playstation 3, I would have felt compelled to buy some software to justify the $600 price premium on a gaming system that lacks many features of the leading next-gen console; but that is an argument for another article.

While HD discs may be the future of the home video market, they still face an uphill battle, even with a clear “winner”. DVD players and discs are 79 times greater than the total HD disc market. Statistics such as only 21% of homes have HDTVs and of that only 14% are connected to an HD source do not bode well for consumers clamoring for HD discs. Couple that with the fact that most HD players, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, upscale existing DVDs. In most instances these look good enough that typical consumers cannot see the benefit of the HD version over an upscaled DVD.

So consider this my last take on the “format war”. I’m going to go play some XBOX 360 and wait for Amazon to put the bargain bin HD-DVD sale in the works so I can stock up. I’ll also be waiting for a Profile 2.0 compatible combo player, or possibly pick up this nifty combo HTPC that is currently the bee’s knees.

Seacrest out.

UPDATE: It appears my assumption of the PS3 having a weak game library driving Blu-Ray sales may have been the wrong assumption to make. It appears that I should have came to the opposite conclusion. That the increased number of PS3/BD players should have correlated to an increased number of disc sales. When you figure the attach rate including the PS3, the disc to player sales ratio is around 1:1; HD-DVD was around 4:1. So the studios should have been looking at the format that was selling more software per player, not what format was selling the most units in the admittedly niche market that is HD disc sales.