"Plastic disks" of any sort are already gone the way of the dodo-bird. Systems on the order of AppleTV, which can distribute the material to your television by means of the Internet, have an absolutely compelling cost advantage over any-and-all plastic media.

Furthermore... unless you have a four-year old, you don't watch the same movie over and over again. ("Barney" is the exception.) The Internet will allow you to watch absolutely anything you want, anytime you want, anywhere you want.

I've invested too much buying HD DVD titles to give up completely. Fortunately, the players are so cheap now tht I was able to pick up a second more capable player at a really good price and can retire the first one to storage to serve as backup.

I still feel Blu Ray players need a tech upgrade and a price lowering before I'm willing to buy in. In the mean time, I'll stock up on HD DVD titles in the distress sales and make due with the excellent upscaling the HD DVD players do with standard DVDs. Sorry, Sony.

I've been waiting 25 years for this last piece of the puzzle to fall into place. I read about HDTV first back in the early 80s in the IEEE Spectrum Magazine. It was little more than a Japanese research project but I knew that it would change world of television. But, little did I know it would take so long.

The original Japanese version of HDTV was analog and not digital so it required a very high-bandwidth signal because it had more than 5 times the information of a tradition TV broadcast. Though analog HDTV was deployed to some limited extent in Japan, HDTV didn't become practical until the development of digital methods of compressing video images. This happened in the 90's and resulted in the DVD along with a grandiose scheme to convert the US to digital TV. By this time it became obvious, that to be complete, HDTV would need something analogous to the DVD. So sure enough, somebody (in fact two competing groups) came out such a HD medium. This led to a format war and the final Blu-ray victory being the last piece in the puzzle.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some HDTV to watch.

I can see I will not be buying any more DVD's at Wal-Mart! I will buy them elsewhere. I just graduated to a HD television and DVD player. But, it pisses me off when they start pushing a product off onto consumers!

What about good old DVDs? Are they about to go the way of VHS? Does this mean having to buy all new DVD players, and movies to replace the ones you replaced with dvds over the last 10 years?
Dont you love this kind of forced marketing so the corporations can make more money. Corporations and our Politicians force the working stiff who loses out and support the corporations. God bless America, our Democratic wonder of the world!! Yeah right.

Does anyone other then myself get the impression that Sony and various Retailers/movie studios are making back room deals?

A price comparison of the two products clearly shows that HD is cheaper, but yet studios and retailers are saying that Blue Ray is more popular which is the more expensive alternative, from a sales standpoint it makes no sense.

Sorry, Toshiba, you're done.