Daniel Dilger who blogs on roughlydrafted.com and is a contributor on Apple Insider wrote an interesting article about the underlying forces at work that led to the demise of HD-DVD. Dilger's very pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft, but compared to the Windows-centric pundits in the rest of the tech press, he has been correct more often than wrong. He argues that HD-DVD was primarily Microsoft's weapon to steer the media formats towards its proprietary Windows formats, but the pushback from open standards advocates was more persuasive and effective this time around.


http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/0...ath-of-hd-dvd/

Although the article gets a few facts wrong, the overall premise I think is spot on. HD-DVD was all about Microsoft trying to tie media standards into its proprietary model. The quote below is all too true to how Microsoft does business, and what they tried to do with HD-DVD.

None of these efforts hid the reality that Microsoft wanted to simply duplicate in media what it had done to the PC desktop: copy existing technology, add proprietary hooks, and then sit back and tax the industry with software fees without adding any value. After having been burned repeatedly, the rest of the industry is now ready to shoot down every effort Microsoft makes to enslave innovation and progress.
The rest of the article has some interesting background about the different codecs, and how Blu-ray's usage of open formats like MPEG-4 H.264 and Java allow for scaling down media content to a wider range of applications.