Effectively Intel and Microsoft have jointly produced a requirements document for the next big storage medium and Blue-Ray has failed a fair few of them:
- Authorised copies of a legally obtained disc
Blue-Ray will not allow you to copy discs, this might seem odd, but Microsoft and Intel want to do this because Intel has a new standard coming out (like Centrino) called Viiv that will allow you to do some funky home entertainment stuff, and in that they want to copy films to a hard drive. Blue-Ray will not let them do that. - Support for hybrid discs
Blue-Ray will not support forwards compatibility (do not get me started Again). Either by one side bing DVD and the other being Blue-Ray or some other method. HD-DVD discs on the other hand have the real potential to be sold as HD-DVD discs and still offer functionality if you only have a standard DVD reader. - Maintaining low production costs
China is backing HD-DVD. So HD-DVD drives will be much cheaper. - Maintaining low disc replication costs
For a disc replication facility to produce Blue-Ray discs, they will have to invest $1.7million per production line. HD-DVD on the other hand does not require a complete retooling of the facility. That isn't to say it won't cost money, but it is cheaper because HD-DVD is fairly close to how our current DVD standard works. - Disc storage capacity
This surprised me, but HD-DVD has working 30GB drives where as Blue-Ray only has 25GB drives. Sony has promised 50GB discs, but they haven't managed to get that into a demonstration unit. - Interactivity standards (I think this means the Title Menus)
HD-DVD is using iHD which is XML powered (sounds like it might use WinFX, better know as the Flash killer). And Blue-Ray is using BDJ which is powered by Java and supposedly so difficult to use, nobody will.
