I wouldn't really consider myself a Blu-ray early adopter; or even an early adopter of the PS3. I bought my PS3 in May of 2007, six months after it was released, and only then because I was able to get it at a hell of a discount ($200 vs. the $600 list price at that time). If the deal hadn't presented itself, I would have waited for both a price cut and some sort of assurance that Blu-ray technology wasn't going to go the way of the Betamax.

Still, even at that time, I felt like Blu-ray had more going for it—both technically and in terms of industry support. I'm not a big fan of the DRM hooks in Blu-ray, but that's really my only complaint. I remember, even before staking a claim in this format war by buying into one of the technologies, reviewing both options and deciding that I would rather see Blu-ray emerge the victor.

So, naturally, I'm happy with today's announcement by Toshiba, which is a more official end to the format war than the de facto, if incremental, end heralded by the dropping of HD-DVD support by Blockbuster, Netflix, Warner Bros., WalMart, et al. over the last few weeks.

VHS was with us for the better part of 20 years, DVD for about 10. Will there be another video storage medium? Some sort of UV-laser disc, perhaps, with another terrible name like YouVee or some crap? I doubt it. Before the lifespan of Blu-ray is up, I anticipate that downloadable content will be sufficiently mature to both alleviate the need for a means of physical distribution and to kill off the businesses that rely on it. As companies like Netflix and Blockbuster transition over to a purely digital content-delivery paradigm, the need for Blu-ray discs will evaporate and, along with it, the need for anyone to develop a successor format. This should happen well before Blu-ray technology is insufficient to meet the consumer demand.

iTunes has already proven that the general public are willing to forgo the physical accessories that accompany our purchases of data, even when the digital data is loaded with unwanted DRM, if the interface for doing so is sufficiently idiot-proof. The next generation of content delivery will begin when such an interface is available for watching TV. The PS3 isn't it, nor is the Xbox360, and it certainly isn't that new Apple thing (it's like DIVX, only... well it's exactly like DIVX). Whenever it comes, it won't involve acrylic discs.

Computers had 3.5" floppy disk drives well into this decade, but now you have to buy a USB floppy drive if you really really need to use one. Ten years from now, we'll all have $20 Blu-ray/DVD/CD read/write drives in our computers that are basically unused while we pipe all of our data in and out via the network. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to when it will be difficult to buy a computer that has any removable disc drive of any kind? I'll put my money on 2020.