Hybrid discs are useful for the transition. I think it will reduce consumer confusion, not increase it. You buy the movie and you stick the disc in your player. You don’t have to care if it is Blu-ray or DVD. The same disc works in either player. If you have a Blu-ray deck at home, and a portable DVD player, you use the same disc everywhere. It is one less thing for the consumer to worry about.

I’d rather have a ‘one-sided’ disc that just works, without worrying about being the right disc, or the right side.

As for the bottom line – realize the major selling point for HD-DVD is that it costs about $.01-.02 less a disc to press one, compared to Blu-Ray. Companies are spending millions to squeeze *half* a penny off the cost of the discs. It seems silly, but it adds up to big money over the life of the technology and the billions of discs that are pressed. HD-DVDs *only* selling points, really, are production costs – Blu-ray is either the same, or better, in every other regard. HD-DVDs only advantage is that you can use existing DVD pressing machines with a simple die change. So there is no investment in new presses, and currently the pressing cost is lower per disc. And that is enough for Toshiba, NEC, etc, to keep backing HD-DVD.

Blu-ray is far superior technologically – and while HD-DVD is basically the *end* of the DVD tech curve, Blu-ray is at the start, with a lot of potential. But it is more revolutionary than evolutionary, so there is the higher cost of entry.

I suppose there may be patent issues involved, or that the $0.30 or so to press a second disk will impact their bottom line that much.