We have mentioned the ongoing battle between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats on BBB before. While most of our readers think the conflict is old hat, this article at softpedia has been making the rounds.

The future of DVD is still unclear, but what is certain is that a replacement is already needed and looked upon. And the favorite candidates seem to be Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. But things are far from being settled yet, as far as these two formats are concerned.

They go on to list the stats that we are all familiar with: A Blu-ray consortium led by inventor Sony is supported by Dell, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Electronic Arts, Vivendi, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Disney, Apple and other electronics manufacturers with a $450 billion warchest. An HD-DVD consortium led by inventor Toshiba and supported by NEC, Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros and New Line Cinema has only a $221 billion warchest.

Softpedia points out that the battle over the future formats is futile because by the time the industry decides on a winner a more advanced technology will come along to obsolete it:

… because both formats, so debated since the beginning of 2004, may find themselves outrun by the Holographic Versatile Disc (HVD).
While Blu-Ray and HD-DVD use the same laser, other producers thought of combining the two lasers (red and blue), in a single ray and thanks to Optware , on a disc the size of a CD or DVD, 1 TB of data could be stored (20 times more than on a Blu-Ray disc), with a transfer rate of 1 Gbit/s.

The format is developed by the Japanese company Optware, in collaboration with Fuji Photo and CMC Magnetics. The three companies allied with Nippon Paint, Pulstec Industrial and Toagosei and “HVD Alliance” was born.

Wait, another format? Are you confused yet? It gets worse. We’re not sure why Softpedia is so gung ho for HVD when there are other holographic storage systems out there:

The research arm of the communications giant has developed a cheap, postage stamp-sized alternative, dubbed Info-MICA. NTT is betting that Hollywood will be particularly keen on the all-plastic medium, because Info-MICAs are hard to pirate.

NTT unveiled its 1-gigabyte prototype earlier this year, and the first commercial versions are slated to hit the market in 2005.

At this point your brain should be hurting. Since we here at BBB live in the future so that you don’t have to, we’d like to point out an analogy: who uses floppy disks anymore? That’s right, all of these technologies are obsolete because no one is going to want to have to carry plastic discs of any kind if they can have every movie they own accessible instantaneously.

But we can hear the naysayers already: “But people like having something tangible in their hands! What will people give each other as gifts? People like shiny plastic discs!”

All we have to say is that was the same argument that the record companies were making when Napster first appeared. Look what good it did them. Tangible discs are so retro.