Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s director of technology strategy for Windows Digital Media breaks down the reasons Microsoft decided to back HD-DVD over Blu-Ray as the next generation of optical media. According to Microsoft, Blu-Ray failed the test in six critical areas.

“Our decision is based mainly on where the formats are today,” Ribas said, referring to Microsoft. “A year and a half ago, both format organizations had very similar goals, and to some extent, the story of Blu-ray was actually very powerful. It had higher capacity, it had what we would consider benefits at the time. But then as time went on, and we’d seen what’s the reality of both formats today, and what were promises versus what’s proven and what’s real, that’s when we decided to make the decision.”

I’ll have to say I haven’t really been following this whole thing very closely and there’s one main reason. Usually competition is a good thing for consumers because it will drive down costs, but this time around that’s probably not the case. You have studios and software companies splitting over which technology to support which means in order to continue to buy a wide spectrum of movies and games, you’ll need to have players capable of reading both formats. Sure, multi-format players won’t take long to hit the market, but how much extra will we have to pay? I’d hate to see this turn into a Beta vs. VHS battle where the superior technology ends up losing out in the end. Then again, after reading this article it isn’t clear that one trumps the other (There’s an interesting comment about capacity in the article). In my mind, it doesn’t really matter which is better; I’ll most likely end up needing both which means I better start saving now.

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