… are due to piracy!

No, that’s what they would probably want you to believe. While both Bluray and HD-DVD are technologically capable of delivering the content that they’re supposed to, their foreseeable death will be induced by… one another.

Consumers don’t care much for formats. They want simplicity - I like the movie, I buy the movie, I watch the movie. Not so fast, Joe. What you bought is a HD-DVD. But your PS3 has a Bluray drive in it. You need to buy another unit for that. What, it doesn’t work with that either? That’s too bad, the AACS keys probably got revoked. You need a firmware upgrade. Ah, shoot… un-upgradeable… new drive.

At this point most people would be going back to their DVDs. It doesn’t look that bad on their second-mortgage bought 52″ 1080p and if they want to enjoy their content they can switch back to TV. I think cable/satellite and PPV services in high-def will be far more successful than movies coming on either HD-DVD or Bluray, unless somebody manages to come around with a true hybrid player - one that doesn’t cripple either of the two formats [I know of Samsung's promises, we'll see.]

Combine this with AACS follies and an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between the AACSLA and random hackers and other freedom fighters [many to be found on the doom9 forums] and what we have here is quite a predicament for a large part of the high-def content distributors and a big thorn in the MPAA’s back. If reports that Vista sales are not that great as originally touted are true then what we might see is a collapse of some of these ‘great ideas’ such as DRM and format un-interoperability because of, effectively, an implosion.