It’s a lost war.

And one where a lot of money is waisted. For nothing.

There’s a big difference between today’s war of formats and the VHS vs. Beta at the early 80s’. At the old days, the winner (ending an almost 10 year’ battle) gained a market share for a decade. A lot of money was spent but more was gained. Blu-Ray and HD DVD are more like Mini-Disks. Who remembers them? No one. It was a format arriving too late. MP3 killed it young. Same with Laser Disks and DVDs.

Streaming media will be the killer of the physical formats for consuming video (and any other “high volume” media, such as video games). As MP3 did (and still doing) to CDs, Streaming media will do to DVD and HD Video.

That’s why:

1. Actually, there’s only one reason why streaming is not here yet. Broadband. If we all had Fiber To The Home (FTTH) no one would have gone to the movie store. Supporting devices would have poped up, and we would all consumed streaming media. FTTH is expensive. So it might take a little while until every home enjoys it, but DSL, over existing infrastructure, is gaining bandwidth and might remove this barrier sooner.
2. Storage. With Hard Disks becoming cheaper and cheaper, and Tera-Bytes not an imaginary storage space in personal desktops, storing movie librarys of 30GB per-movie (in HD) is no problem.
3. Sharing of content across platforms. 4G in mobile is getting closer. With DRM-Free media becoming a reality, sharing personal media libraries across platforms (3 and 4 gen. iPhones and other “combined” PMPs will show up in a growing rate in the following months and years) is becoming something everybody wants and will be able to do. It’s easier if your media is in the right format for sharing in the first place.
4. Media centers going main stream. After years of trying to convince the market to bring the computer into the living room, it seems Bill Gates is finally doing something right. Maybe the little help from Apple, AKA Apple TV, didn’t hurt the effort. Having HD in the living room makes it easier to consume and store a software-based media library . I’ll venture a not-so-risky bet, and say Tivo will be a player in this field very soon as well.
5. Streaming rental services. Like Netflix and Blockbuster (understanding it’s a join-or-close-the-business) and of course “On-Demand” video which is already here, makes it easier to consume.
6. HD in YouTube. Will soon arrive. True, it’s still expensive to broadcast HD, but smaller services are managing (to name one – Vimeo), and with all the money in the bank, HD on YouTube will probably be introduced in 2008. This too will make consumers more comfortable with consuming software-based media.
7. Soft-copy sale points. iTunes selling video over the internet (CrunchGrear over took me by hours to the subject of this post , Amazon joining in soon and other vendors will make building your own movie library easy and not so much of a revolution. We’re used to consuming music this way for years.

So what’s my bet? Not yet in 2008 (I make joke!).

But 2009’s end-of-year lists will include the funerals of the Blu-Ray and HD DVDs. Hope they’re going to church every Sunday….