Film Critic James Berardinelli has been saying this for ages. He just posted another article about it actually, and made one important point the ars article do

Film Critic James Berardinelli has been saying this for ages. He just posted another article about it actually, and made one important point the ars article doesn't. http://reelviews.net/reelthoughts/august_2007.html http://reelviews.net/reelthoughts/august_2007.html The problem faced by high def DVD is that consumers won't wait for the format war to end. They'll bypass it for the Next Big Thing. That will likely be high def downloads. At this point, there are four impediments to making this an effective way of obtaining home video copies of movies, but all are being addressed. It's a mistake to assume that people are waiting to see who wins the format war. Normal people just want to watch high-quality movies easily and conveniently, and do not care at all what format it's in.