Jacobs ladder mark willis For one thing, it will take 12 to

Jacobs ladder mark willis For one thing, it will take 12 to 18 months for Blu-ray players to become as cheap and full-featured as HD DVD players, which have been selling for just over 100, jacobs ladder mark willis to ABI Research. Many people who did buy HD DVD players did so recently. In fact, Toshiba said the holiday season was its best ever. Stephen Brown, a Huntington Beach, Calif. , technology manager who bought an HD DVD player in November, doesnt regret it, even though his wife now calls him Betamax Brown. Just the fact that I could go out and spend 119 or 120 and have a really nice player, that was a no-brainer at that point, he said Tuesday. Brown said it he will probably look at getting a Blu-ray player in a year or so, when the price comes down to around 150 from about 400 now and various features become standard. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs deliver crisp, clear pictures and sound, a perfect match for the high-definition TVs sets Americans have been rushing to buy for the past two years. But HD DVD players are also able to connect to the Internet to download trailers and other bonus content for discs, and can have a director or actor provide commentary in a small window while the movie plays. The studios that supported HD DVD took advantage of these features in innovative if not always very useful ways: Viewers of Universal Studios Evan Almighty HD DVD could shop for ecologically friendly items like recycled toilet paper through their player. Blu-ray players capable of showing picture-in-picture a feature called Bonus View have only just started to appear. So-called BD-Live players, which can take advantage of Internet content, are expected on the market this spring. The fact that the PlayStation 3 console included a Blu-ray drive is one reason the format eventually won out. Sony Corp. sold 5 million PS3 machines since its 2006 debut. But the real death knell for HD DVD was the last months decision by Warner Bros. Entertainment to drop the format and release only Blu-ray discs and DVDs. That had tremendous impact, Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida said Tuesday in Tokyo. If we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win. Warner joined Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Co. and News Corp. s Twentieth Century Fox in shunning the HD DVD, leaving Universal and Paramount Studios in the HD DVD camp. Universal on Tuesday said it would focus on releasing Blu-ray discs, but did not say if it would cease putting out HD DVDs. After Warners announcement, Toshiba was initially defiant. It cut player prices and kept touting the formats benefits. But the bad news kept rolling in. Last week, Netflix Inc. said it would cease carrying rentals in HD DVD. On Friday, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it would stop selling HD DVD players and discs. Even with the HD DVD out of its way, Blu-ray isnt likely to be the success that the DVD was, given the many viewing options consumers have. The big advantage of the DVD over broadcast and cable has been that the viewer can choose when to watch what. But that advantage has been eroded by video-on-demand from cable companies, many of which are now in high definition. Comcast Corp. , the countrys largest cable company, plans to offer more than 1, 000 high-def movies this year. Just last week, Apple Inc. upgraded its Apple TV set-top device to enable downloads of high-definition rental movies from the Internet. Microsoft Corp. s Xbox 360 game console also shows downloaded HD rentals. Blu-ray Disc has passed its first real test by beating HD-DVD, wrote David Mercer, an jacobs ladder mark willis at Strategy Analytics in London.