What are your thoughts on Blu Ray and HD DVD?

Several questions for me come to mind. One is, will I have to buy 2 DVD players for my home and another 2 for my PC? We now know that the standards will not be unified, so my questions are therefore ratified.

The other burning question is based on something I've wondered in the past. One of the posters replies come to mind now in light of this.
Considering HD DVD (30gigs) and Blu-Ray (50gigs) will have more than enough space to house entire seasons of TV Shows.....how much do you think companies will charge for these DVDs?

Alias has 22 45 minute episodes in a season and is housed on 6 DVDs
Battlestar and Buffy have 14/12 episodes per season respectively, are 45 minutes and are housed in 4/3 DVDs respectively
Farscape is 24 45 minute episodes per season and is housed on 11 DVDs

My question in the past was WHY is farscape on 11 DVDs to which the poster replied something along the lines of "they want people to pay more, so they put them on more DVDs" - I'm inclined to believe this - since Alias is an example of how 22 Episodes fit on 6 DVDs perfectly fine. We may thing, ok - how about the extras...? True....farscape has alot of extras, but though I am a fan - I don't care for that superfluous stuff, and it's still no real excuse because they've released a new edition with even MORE stuff on them. Star Trek is another example of a series with just too many DVDs, which SEEM to cause it to be pricey 90-100 US.
As far as I see it, in a perfect world all sets would come in standard and 'collector' - the collector being the one with lots of extra, the standard being the one with what watchers want, which in my case is the content (movie or series) and the bloopers - that's what satisfies me.

So, now that 1-2 DVDS (Blu Ray/HD DVD) can house entire seasons and collections of movies (like, Jurassic Park 1, 2 & 3 or Star Wars 1-6); How much do you think we'll expect to pay for things like DVD Sets? Games? Movies? and Movie Sets.
Using more than a single disk used to be a reason and cause for a more than reasonable price - Lord of the Rings, 3 DVDs cost roughly 40, deluxe edition more since it's like 7 DVDs....But now that you can fit 10-11 DVDs down to roughly 2-3 HD DVD/1-2 Blu Ray - will we be expected to psychologically adjust and buy 1 DVD for nearly $100?, do you think prices will actually remain the same and be somewhat based on content rather than 'amount of DVDs?, or will they be forced to reduce the cost? Personally, the Alias and Farscape question gets to me - I have no problem buying Alias for 35-40, it seems like a good investment. Likewise, even if it was on 1 DVD, I don't think I'd mind paying the same for it. Farscape and Star Trek on the other hand......I can't swallow $90 for it now, I'll choke on $90 for a single DVD.

There is a lot of marketing going on in regards to the multi-dvd box sets. A simpe ploy of saying "An Incredible 11 DVD Box Set!!" sounds better than "A 6 DVD Box Set!!". The marketing ploy here is to give the consumer the thought that they are getting so much more with the 11 DVD's when in actual fact the same stuff can fit on to 6. Even though Blu-Ray and HD-DVD's will be able to hold more stuff, the marketing departments of these companies will be hard at work coming up with ploys and tactics to make the box sets more attractive to consumers by adding more discs than needed to give the consumer a feeling of value.

It looks as if the Blu-Ray disc will be the standard as Sony is striking up deals with more and more companies.

Is Toshiba going to just give up? Or will we all be buying 2 DVD players?

I think we all will be buying 2 DVD Players, yay more wires

While it's very likely that they will try to market seperate players, writers, mediums, cleaners, etc, there are two alternatives that could make it easy on consumers, while not forcing either company to compromise.

The most plausible method would have to be a hybrid player or writer that has a wide spectrum optical device or simply two different optical devices. We should see these out about seven to twelve months after the launch of the new mediums.

However, IBM developed a concept that could easily come to the rescue here: Hybrid disks.

What you would essentially have is a Blu-Ray layer and an HD-DVD layer.

For an additional $5-10, the customer would be paying for a disk that would be readable and writable in either player... or possibly both if you could move the data so that it didn't conflict with data on another layer.