Thats not confusion...

The BBC reports the usual industry take on the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format battle. 'Consumers are confused!'.

Consumers are not confused about the merits of Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD. It is the idiot executives of the companies behind the battling formats who are confused.

Anyone who buys either format today has at least a 50% chance of betting on the wrong horse. Not only will their exorbitantly expensive player be an obsolete pile of junk, so will their even more exorbitantly expensive collection of disks. It is quite likely neither format will succeed.

At this point it appears that Blu-Ray is more likely to be the Betamax techology. The Sony execs refuse to allow porn on their format. Blu-ray continues the 'region' system that allows differential pricing of DVDs according to market, HD-DVD is region free. The other differences in the technical specs are irrelevant.

Someone who spends $800 plus to get the latest gadget wants their friends to be coo-ing in admiration, not pointing out that its likely to turn out to be a pile of junk.

Sony's wheeze of tying the Playstation to Blu-ray may turn out to be the worst move of all. The additional cost might well end up killing the Playstation franchise and how many adults hook the kids' playstation up to the best TV in the house?

It might well end up that this market is eventually decided by the computer backup market, while this may seem to favor Blu-Ray with 25Gb vs 15Gb, another possibility is that the computer market skips a technology generation and heads straight to a UV laser technology that delivers 100Gb or more.