It's been over a year since Blu-ray won the HD format war, but people still aren't biting. Many in the US who have HDTVs watch standard def broadcasts and DVDs because they don't care and/or don't see the difference. Or is it simply a perspective issue, since DVDs and Blu-ray are so similar.

There was an interesting episode of the TWiT podcast recently, where the panel debates why Blu-ray is still the red-headed step-child of home theater. Even though many are purchasing HDTVs, it's only because those are the only TVs to buy; their purchase has nothing to do with HD performance. These expensive devices are being used to view standard definition cable and DVDs because of an apathy toward superfluously high quality. As Robert Llewellen (Crichton of Red Dwarf fame) explained, Blu-ray isn't game changing. It didn't shift the paradigm that DVD did to VHS. After being amazed by the optical disc technology that required no rewinding and took up less space, the physically similar Blu-ray disc left much to be desired. To fully appreciate Blu-ray, both a high definition TV andsound system are required, making the entire experience a costly one.

If so many viewers aren't concerned with 1080 progressive lines of resolution, then maybe the next format shouldn't be concerned with quality and more with physical convenience. Anyone that has collected large amounts of media knows that it stacks up pretty fast. Hundreds of CDs, DVDs and other obsolete media have little resale value once the medium has been replaced and end up eating up space. Blu-rays are the exact same dimension as DVD - 12cm diameter, taking up almost exactly amount of space on a shelf, short of slimmer cases. Discs still need to be inserted into players and swapped for different content, all with the risk of irreparable damage to the media. Standard Blu-ray holds 25GB per layer and most discs have two layers (just like DVDs; 4.7GB per layer). The high quality of the video and audio (with multiple audio tracks), added with the supplemental features, usually utilizes most of this space.

Even though the music industry is well on its way to exclusive digital distribution, retail stores manage to find ways of selling digital music. Common examples are gift cards to online stores, just as iTunes and Napster, but some of these cards actually "purchase" specific albums or other collections of music. Similar forms of distribution are being investigated for feature length movies, but downloading that much data takes too long on standard US broadband (which pales in comparison to some EU and Asian markets).

The H.264 codec has become the standard in compressing video for online transmission. It's very efficient and is an open and easily supposed standard. A feature film of DVD quality (or better) could easily fit in under a gigabyte. With consumer flash drives easily reaching 16GB at an affordable price, multiple movies could be included at a "standard" quality, or a single movie at a higher quality. Some companies have recently announced plans to distribute films in this manner, but providing copyrighted material in such an easily shareable format will lead to equally inconvenient DRM scheme in the player. Disney has announced plans to test the waters of flash media movies in Japan, on microSD instead of USB drives. National Treasure and Pirates of the Caribbean are among the first titles to pilot the program.

No word yet on what people think about movies on flash media rather than downloadable content, but that may be just because most people don't care or understand the technology. Boiled down, the choice is now "all digital, no physical media, download on demand", or "physical media, instant playability, collectible".