I knwo that and that's not what I meant. The digital switchover will leave many people in need of a new TV, and many will replace old ones with HDTV models. Not to mention that thanks to the government's piss poor education of the public on this, many people now think they NEED an HDTV in 2009.

I disagree. The formats came out a decade after their predecessor media and right at the time of the affordable HD boom. With the 2009 change over, HD will be more popular than ever. With cable and sat said to offer 100 HD channels by the end of the year, you will see more and more HD displays in houses and it's appropriate to have HD players to go with them. As for whether is enough of an upgrade, it sure looks like it to me.

SNIPPED INCORRECT VHS COMMENT

The masses care about the things they are educated on. Don't kid yourself and think that most people didn't see much of a difference between VHS and DVD at the outset either. They asked the SAME QUESTIONS you bring up now. Attitudes will change, just like the did with DVD.

Again, this is an incorrect assumption and a misuse of facts. Why would anyone HAVE To replace their collection? Will their BD player not play standard DVD media? Yes it will, and it will also upconvert it. I am most buying new releases and titles I didn't have on DVD with the occasional upgrade. People will just continue their normal buying habits.

This is again incorrect. Firmware upgradability means that people are not forced to buy new equipment every time a new feature is added. It's probably one of the biggest ADVANCEMENTS in CE technology over the past decade.

Now this I agree with. :D

Why? The digital switchover only affects people watching OTA analog TV. Who are the people most likely to be watching that? Limited incomes, older people, and people that don't care very much about television. And you think they're going to run out and buy an HDTV? They'll get a converter box and be done with it.

Thats just false. VCRs were the consumer standard by the early 1980's.

I distinctly remember renting BETA throughout the 80s. Sony did not admit defeat and start producing VHS machines until 1988.

But my other points remain true. Commercially affordable VHS tapes were not available until the early 90s.

My parent's (nowhere near part of a niche market) had a VCR and rented movies in the mid-80's.

Beta may have existed, but VCR was the clear standard by the early 1980's. To say otherwise is false.

And the point with "commercially affordable VHS tapes" has nothing to do with the standard. Studios at that point were selling VHS tapes at "rent through" not sale pricing. I remember my buddy being the biggest Aliens freak out there and he had to have his mom pay something like $86 bucks or so for a new VHS copy through Blockbuster.

I will go out on a limb and say the average consumer did not have a large VHS collection. They were relatively big and they wore out. Plus you could record anything you wanted on pay channels and most everything was cropped anyway to fit a 4:3 screen.

I'm sure there were a lot of people out here with large VHS collections, but the idea of movie collecting was pretty out there.

Actually, VHS had built up a huge lead over Beta by the mid 1980's due to two reasons: longer recording times and more generous licensing terms from JVC/Panasonic. Even with Sony's lead on the Hi-Fi format, JVC erased that advantage with its own Hi-Fi format one year later, and JVC got Super VHS out before Sony countered with Beta ED.

Today, VHS decks are still very useful for recording analog cable TV shows (and will continue to do so since analog cable won't be going away soon--the change to digital broadcasting affects only over-air broadcasts).

But getting back on topic, :) I think we need to watch how fast Warner starts to announce the release of Blu-ray only titles. I can see titles like the high-definition version of the Lord of the Rings movies and The Golden Compass going Blu-ray only when they are released.

I used information from WIKI and clearly was incorrect.

But to say that affordable tapes have nothing to do with the standard is just silly. Jigga's point was about purchasing and collection habits. That goes straight to that.

Before DVD the concept of amassing a movie collection was virtually unknown to the general public, and film buffs were collecting laserdiscs, not VHS tapes.

Actually my post was wrong, people had a large VHS taped collection, but not a large paid for VHS collection. So DVD (for me as well) was a first time purchase. Which is what the problem is...people have been buying DVDs up through and including the present. You gotta convince them to dump that stuff and start over with HD media of any sort.

And when I mean large VHS collection, I mean you could fit 3 movies on one VHS . Sure the quality wasn't great, but it hardly made a difference. One of my favorite things my grandmother used to send me were VHS tapes with stuff taped from HBO. I loved that stuff. One VHS had all kinds of goodies on it, Goonies, Empire Strikes Back, that kind of stuff.

I'm sure cinephiles will rebuy stuff and all that, I'm not so sure the masses will..including myself. even when HD DVD was a viable format, I was cherry picking both new releases and catalog titles. Honestly, the current new releases lately haven't appealed to me as much as catalog stuff.

There were some affordable tapes though. I remember buying E.T. and Cinderella in 1988. There were plenty available at sell-through prices; they just weren't the new releases.

However, it is true that people weren't buying nearly as many as they would buy DVDs.

I don't disagree with that. What is your point? :D :D

Yeah I remember E.T. It was a relatively unique situation - there was a lot of hype about E.T. being priced to own. I remember filling out like 300 drop in entries at a local grocery store and I won! It was real sweet.

You would think that, but as DVD Josh said, the miseducation of consumers on the topic can and has lead many people to purchase HDTVs. I have seen this fairly often actually, as I work for a cable company, and am in constant contact with consumers. Many of which abandoned older TVs for HDTVs, not understanding that as cable customers they wouldn't even be effected! This 2009 switchover is scaring people in a similar way to the whole Y2K fiasco, and many want to future-proof their equipment by making the jump to HD.

MaxPower1987, who is a an insider at blu-ray.com, says that Paramount needs 2 things to happen to release on BD:

1. WB goes BD exclusive (done)
2. Buyout their contract with Toshiba, which he says is $50 million (DreamWorks received $100 million in cash/incentives).

He says they are comparing what the buyout will cost vs how much they could make by releasing on BD now.

Paramount ain't' going to make $50M on BD right now. However, holiday season 08 is a different matter.

If its $50 million buyout, I'm guessing the business decision would be to wait and not release any HD media until the deal expires.

While true, the BDA could possibly buy them out.

I'm sure in the HD DVD agreement there is something like "must release X amount of movies per quarter/year". They can't just not release a thing.

Wasn't the E.T. tape green in some places (towards the top)? Freaked me out as a kid.

Yea, the little "door" covering the tape was (is) green. Also had a holographic sticker on it somewhere to ensure authenticity.

Did anyone else catch this? What the hell is this guy implying?? That we'll be able to burn our own copies of Blu-ray movies with a BD recorder???

I don't know about this. But I am excited about the prospect of downloading a movie file from the BD to my PSP via my PS3.

I didn't really understand that either. But one thing is sure: With Sony calling the shots, I doubt that you'll ever be able to make a full-rez copy of any movie. Sony has a long track record of not smiling on personal-use copies.

I doubt it would be any different from Toshiba.