As astute observers of the media technology scene opine as to the emergence and likely outcome of a major confrontation, on the scale of VHS versus Betamax, between Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD DVD high-density digital media standards, even more astute observers seem to be in agreement that they are both fighting the last war, as far as the storage and delivery of digital video is concerned.

A few hours ago, In "Blu-Ray to Win Format War?--Forrester Research believes the Sony-led format will indeed succeed in replacing the DVD as the next-generation disk," BusinessWeek reports that:

"It will be a long, tedious war but Forrester Research is convinced that the Sony-led Blu-ray format will succeed in replacing DVD as the next-generation disc. The irony, however, is that by the time consumers are ready to switch digital media may be far more important than physical media."

The same point is made in an October 21, 2005, article from Reuters, entitled "DVD format war brews even as videos go off-disk," where "irony" is again used by Forrester analyst Ted Schadler to describe the "civil war" between Blu-ray and HD DVD, which may only serve to accelerate the transition to a completely different way of storing and distributing the digital content of the future:

"Hollywood is gearing up for an ugly war over rival DVD formats, but the real battle may be in keeping customers hooked on physical discs at all.

"'The irony of this format war is that it comes at the tail end of the century-long era of physical media,' said Ted Schadler, analyst with Forrester Research.

"'While a high-definition video format does bring benefits over today's standard-definition discs, in movies as in music consumers are moving beyond shiny discs,' said Schadler."

Mark Cuban says much the same thing in a blog entry entitled "HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future":

"I love looking for ways to screw up conventional wisdom. Right now in the entertainment world, the conventional wisdom is that both sides on the HD DVD vs. Blue Ray DVD will battle it out and a standard for HD on DVD will emerge.  No one is trying to rush to a compromise because the big media companies want to squeeze as much money as they possibly can out the current DVD business cycle.

"Good. The longer it takes, the less chance any format of DVD has of having a place in the future of home entertainment.  Don’t look now, but the price and size of hard drives have fallen like a rock, while capacities have soared, with no slowdown in site [sic]." 

All of which means that the coming "battle of the century" between Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD DVD will be, in the not-so-long run, more like "recreational competition" than an important determinant of the future shape of digital content delivery.