arstechnica.com
Give me a $35 DVD player and Bose's marketing team, and I'll outsell any HD player on the market. We'll mark the price up to $250, put it in a nice sleek brushed-aluminum case, hold special Demo Events in all the Best Buy stores, and you'll swear that my player has the crispest video in the world - because, as the quality differences become smaller, the psychological factors become more and more significant.
The only problem with this business plan is that Steve Jobs had it figured out years ago, and he's way ahead. While the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray folks fight it out, Steve is going to crush them by selling lower-quality video in higher-quality boxes.
http://reelviews.net/reelthoughts/august_2007.html
The problem faced by high def DVD is that consumers won't wait for the format war to end. They'll bypass it for the Next Big Thing. That will likely be high def downloads. At this point, there are four impediments to making this an effective way of obtaining home video copies of movies, but all are being addressed.
It's a mistake to assume that people are waiting to see who wins the format war. Normal people just want to watch high-quality movies easily and conveniently, and do not care at all what format it's in.