[jqp]

Bill Gates thinks so. In his interview here he says some interesting things:

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/10/14/news/13474.shtml

Gates: Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there's not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won't work well on PCs. You won't be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.

    It's not the physical format that we have the issue with, it's that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that'd be fine.

    For us it's not the physical format. Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything's going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it's even unclear how much this one counts.


It could happen...

This explains their decision to go with HD-DVD, other than the fact that it competes with Sony

[Don_S]

I predict the next format will be something small and compact that does not require a transport.  Something like the removeable memory for a digital camera.

I further predict there will be two formats.  One from Sony and one from the rest of the world.

[Rob Babcock]

This topic dovetails nicely into this.  Will the next format be no format at all (ie a virtual one)?

[jqp]

In his view the "next" format is now here, but has not "won" yet - so Blu-ray or HD-DVD would be the last disc format.

Why does the last format have to have a dash in it?

[Jade East]

The problems with HD video are storage and distribution.
Optical disks and good compression are the best solution
right now. 

1920x1080i uncompressed video is over 400GB an hour
even SD uncompressed is 90 gigs an hour. Compression codecs
and computing horsepower have brought these sizes down to a
usable size and bitrate to allow for disk based delivery, storage
and playback.

Very few want to store almost a terabyte of data on a fast sata
array just to watch "death race 2000". Compression and disks
let us watch high quality at home without the massive storage
and bandwidth needed for uncompressed playback. The good
news is that the compression used is very,very good the bad
news is that its still alot of data.

Consumers have shown with mp3 that convience will win over
quality and I think that we will be with the 1920x1080 video
as the highend of domestic video for along time.
I do think that we will see more optical disk formats just not
new video formats.