Walmart Drops HD-DVD
Update 2007-02-18: Looks like the cutting and running is already in progress.
The corpulent lady has sung: Walmart is set to phase out HD-DVD players and media by June of this year. That’s pretty much it for the home video prospects of the format, coming on the heels of similar announcements from Netflix and Best Buy (although BB will still stock HD-DVD hardware/media, it will officially recommend Blu-ray). It might still find use as a storage media, but I think at this point Toshiba and company will just cut and run. What remains to be seen is how quickly the holdout HD-DVD-exclusive studios (Universal, Paramount, Dreamworks) will start releasing in Blu-ray.
I think that downloadable content will eventually become the primary distribution channel for home video, but I think that there will always be a market for physical media. The audio/videophiles will still represent a niche market for the highest-quality video/audio encodes of films. A more interesting question to me is whether downloads will take over before Blu-ray surpasses DVD as the home video format of choice.
I hope that the net effect of all this is that Netflix starts increasing their Blu-ray inventory so my wait for popular movies is reduced.
