The current state of play.

[jason_grumpy]

Actually I found it quite humorous that HD-DVD fanbois were celebrating a victory on Amazon for a day. An organized buy that only registered on one website, and actually decreased others (dvdempire). With all buyers holding out for the big buy day, they neglected other websites, not to mention B&M stores. All it did was focus the sales of a product on to one website for a day. It's not like new orders were generated from this organized buy. Besides, half of the orders were prolly pre-orders that will be cancelled prior to shipment.

The fun thing out of this will be to see how much they affected the neilson scan data of ACTUAL discs sold nationwide and not just by amazon. I don't think it will be much though, maybe a slight hiccup, as preliminary for the 15th still show the same thing.. HD-DVD on a slow downward slope with BR pulling away.

Coupled with the orgasms over cheap chinese players by Walmart, this week has been pretty amusing from the HD-DVD camp. I'm not sure about you guys, but if Walmart became the flagship for one format.. um.. wouldn't you be just a bit worried FOR that format? I'd love to the 'features' these players will have. I'm sure for $150 dollars you're going to get HDMI 1.3, full audio codec decoding, 7.1 analog out, and excellent firmware updates. Heck this things going to maybe even be built to last 6 months. For some reason these guys think it's going to be a Toshiba quality model. The final nail in the coffin for HD-DVD if they true and they come off shoddier than Toshiba's current players. I mean lets be honest here, do any of you own cheap chinese DVD players of ANY kind that lasted more than a year with minimal use?

But i'll go out on a limb here and make the statement. I think it has to do with drive chassis/diode manufacturing that benefits both HD-DVD and BR.

However, pictures speak a thousand words. Next time I stop at my various Hollywood Videos, Circuit City, and Best Buy's i'll take a few pictures of the Blu-Ray titles compaired to the HD-DVD ones and rain on a few fanbois parades. Surely all of those places can't be conspiring with each other to eliminate HD-DVD. Each one of these places have dedicated at least 50% more space to Blu-Ray, especially Hollywood Video which recently expanded their shelve space by two, with HD-DVD an after thought.