Neither! The technology has already surpassed them. Their formats will be used for only video games.
Well… VOD is not widespread enough to make a dent in Blockbuster at this point, and even if it were, it is missing a few more features at this point… Not sure what kind you have, but mine is just the current cable releases - this month’s HBO & Showtime selections which is newish movies (about a month behind video release) plus whatever old movies they choose to sell. You can fast forward and rewind, but there are no chapters, no special features, no zoom, no alternate view, etc. The wiki article make sit seem like some areas have a huge selection of new and old movies, but at least in my area so far it’s just the cable releases which is about a month behind dvd release times, and it’s a limited selection.
It should satisfy Joe Average though…current releases, cost comparable to rental, convenient. I don’t use it because of the P&S, but not everyone is that picky.
Video On Demand suffers from poor quality, flaky hardware to get it, poor market penetration, and at least around here, it’s not in HD and the movies on it are largely crap. Around here, the selection is awful, you have to have a digital cable box, and the system is very flaky. Sometimes you can’t connect at all. It’s slow as molasses. And you have to watch it within 24 hours. But the main problem is that the price is too high. $6.99 for a movie? When I can get one from the video rental store at 3 for 9.99 or $4.99 for a new release? $10 to rent an HD movie? That’s just out of whack.
If they fix the system a bit, get HD content, and rent movies for $2.99 I’ll be using it heavily. Most especially, I’d use it if they had a big catalog. But they don’t. It’s usually a total of maybe a hundred movies or something. Give me the long tail of movies. I’d like to be able to say, “Hey, let’s watch ‘Gran Prix’ with Steve McQueen tonight”, then log into VoD, go to the classic movie archives containing thousands of older movies, and rent it for $1.99 in HD.
If I had that, I’d be watching movies every day.
Yeah, you’re on Shaw too 
The major problem with downloading movies is the reliability. I can’t see this issue ever going away, as in 10 years time proving your VOD movie was a crock will still be much harder than returning a disk and saying ‘Look at this pile of doo’.
For me and everyone i know dvd players are used for playing rentals 90% of the time. Although Blockbusters isn’t the only player in the market it’s decision will certainly make a lot of people pay attention.
I think it may depend to be honest. I have never rented a DVD (or tape before that). And not many of my friends do- we would prefer to buy the ones we want- or record them if they come up.
LG apparently has a player that plays HD-DVDand Blu-Ray, which leads me to believe that the “war” will end up being as relevant as the DVD-R vs. DVD+R battle.
Then again, this player lists (according to my May 22 PC Magazine) for $1,299.95. The Toshiba HD-DVD player that they also reviewed listed for $799.99. So maybe I’m wrong. I have no idea how much it would cost to get the licensing to do both. Just throwing that out there.
There are also new incarnations of HD-DVD that have slightly more storage capacity than Blu-Ray discs.
I agree that the leap from DVD to HD-DVD/Blu-Ray isn’t as significant as that from VHS to DVD, so unless one side or the other dramatically cuts the price of their players to the same as standard DVD players before the other, expect to see the war continue.
Interesting article on MSNBC about the whole HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray thing.
Hate to blow your mind on this but your price is WAY off. Too high, in fact. Anymore, a 500 gig internal HD runs from 110-120 (depends of course if you have a sale or what speed you want the drive to run. But for this purpose, we’re talking about a 3 gig/s SATA Drive). If you decide to do refurbished, you can get them even cheaper. Right now, I have 1.25 Tb’s in my server and I’ll estimate that I’ve paid about 300 bucks for the whole thing.
Space is only getting cheaper. In 5 years, I can imagine getting 2 Tb’s for about 200 bucks total, if that.
So what you’re saying is “Your estimate of $300 is WAY off. More like $200, or less.”
That’s the price for the raw drive. All the associated infrastructure that needs to support it generally doubles the cost.
What infrastructure? You mean the computer?