Guardian: Will Blu-ray be one last flop?

Both new disc types offer two things, HD movies and a SD TV series on a single disc. I don't expect mass take up of HD technology for some time in the UK, so this will be a US led revolution. Even in the US adoption of either format will be slow, and I guess for most people the first player they will have is a Playstation or XBox. I also expect in the next five years some low-cost stand-alone dual-format players will emerge, negating the whole debate. Going forward the market will be closer to the current games market with some films available in one format and some in both. I strongly suspect that both these formats will suffer the fate of the mini-dics, in that they will be beaten not by each other but by a change in consumer habits, with downloads taking over from conventional DVDs.