Unfortunatly, in my humble opinion, Sony Corp has once again doomed both new formats to a certain eventual death, by remaining steadfast in their historical stand as a company that will NOT share profits with other companies, even if they have a better (or equal) technology.
Now, you can debate whether Blu-ray is better than HD-DVD (or vice-verse), but lets look at history:
Remember Quad? It was a great idea, but died (almost-I still quad) because everyone thought they had a better way of decoding and didn’t want to share the $$. To be able to listen to all the great records and tapes of that era, you would have had to own at least 3 (or more) decoders. Consumers said ‘No Way!’. Then, years later, we got ’surround sound’. What is that? Sounds just like a ’New Quad’ to me. So far so good. But wait. Here comes DVD-A and SACD. Once again Sony decides it will make only players that will play SACD and not DVD-A, because they don’t want you to buy DVD-A’s. Why? Because SACD is their baby. So today we have a small market for DVD-A and a small market for SACD, when we could have had a LARGE market for a single format, if the manufacturers had worked together and actually ADVERTISED this single format (when was the last time you saw ANY advertising for either format? Not a disc with SACD or DVD-A, but an add for a Hi-definition format? Never?) .
Blu-ray and HD-DVD will suffer the same fate as all the previous excellent formats, simply because the large corporations can’t (read: WON’T!) streamline it into a single choice for consumers, thus enabling us to buy a single player and a single format. Besides, how many different formats do you really need ANY movie or hi-res audio in?
Sorry to be the voice of bummer, but this is the reality of the new formats.
Rock on,

Lonster