Kasper Connections

"What?" you say, I thought the Blu-ray HD DVD war was over.

Yes it is true Toshiba ceased the manufacturing of it's wonderful high definition DVD player. So you may ask why wouldn't Blu-ray Survive? Well it seems the the battle has just begun. Just as the music industry has had to face digitial downloading as competition, so to is the movie industry.

Most of you probably do not yet download live video content to your Home Theater, but media extenders are becoming more and more popular. A media extender is a box that can be hooked up to your home network via, a wired or wireless connection and then plugged into your HDTV with a video connetion. This allows you to stream videos directly from the internet or a hard drive located in your home to you TV. This means you do not have to buy hard copies of movies any more.

So you may ask what does a media extender look like? The most popular media extenders can be found disguised as game machines. Sony's Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox both allow you to download and stream movies over the internet to your Home Theater. Network hardware manufactures like Linksys and Dlink make stand alone media extenders, and let's not forget Apple, they have a media extender called Apple TV.

There are more and more places you can now stream content from, the most known is probably Netflix and itunes, but Blockbuster Online allows you to download movies also. Many new services are coming out all of the time. I believe I heard Amazon is in the game too, or will be shortly.

With the ability to start downloading movies legally, and the amount of bandwidth to our homes increasing you can see why many people are saying Blu-ray will not be as long lasting as the DVD was, surely not as long as the VCR.

So do you get a Blu-ray player for your Home Theater. I'd say Yes it is still currently the best way to get HD movies, with the best sound. But you may want to be cautious about investing your retirement into a Blu-ray collection, like you did with DVD's.

Do you have a media extender? Do you stream movies from the internet to your tv? We'd like to hear your comments.

If you are asking yourself what is Blu-ray? A good site to check out is blu-ray.com.