Farewell HD DVD, Congrats Blu-Ray

Well this news article says it all really: Toshiba to exit HD DVD, end format war

The war is over! All I can say is: thank goodness I never bought an HD-DVD player, even when Microsoft tried to suck me into buying one for the Xbox 360 for $120. Moral of the story: if it sounds to good to be true...

So the countdown begins for:

1. Blu-Ray for Xbox 360 (how long till MS announce one + ship one) - I'm picking 1 month, and 12 months after that.
2. Really cheap, mass market Blu-Ray players (& Blu-Ray HDD recorders) - I'm picking 12months to 2 years (but of course hoping for less)
3. Massive HD-DVD title sales @The Warehouse and JB Hifi etc. - Maybe 1 month spreading all the way to Xmas?

What I really want (right now) is a Blu-Ray burner for my PC (for the backup data storage capacity). A player for movies is kind of secondary. But at least now, when I look around for toys, I know there's only one flavour to shop for. HD-DVD is so last year...

This wired article does have a good point though - has it taken too long for one of these two to die off, so they've effectively missed the boat and no-one's going to buy Blu-Ray movies either now? I don't know. I'd love to have HD movies on my big TV in the lounge (don't care about the PC/Laptop), but I'm not stumping up to Xtra for the massive amounts of extra cash it would take to allow me to download lots of good HD movies. Maybe when a 100GB/month data plan arrives for $100 then I'll be more inclined.