Some are calling it the end of the format war, others are calling it the beginning. Warner Home Video announced last week that it has joined the Blu-ray Disc Association and will release its films on Blu-ray, and, ostensibly, HD DVD as well. Universal is now the only studio of the six majors to be committed to HD DVD and not Blu-ray.

The format war just took and interesting turn as some juicy pre-CES news leaked out to the Internet today courtesy of the New York Times. Next week at CES Warner will be announcing the Total HD disc, which will carry both Blu-ray and HD DVD transfers of a title on a single disc.

<I>UAV</I> readers have been flooded with so much news lately about the transition to HDTV- with respect to both the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format war, and this country's transition to digital TV broadcast- that I almost feel bad bringing this one up. But it's true- in late October Warner Bros. began field trials of digital cinema presentations in Japan featuring so-called 4K resolution, which is, gulp, an image with a pixel count of 4096x2160.

In these TiVo-centric times it's tough for advertisers to figure out how to get their expensive to produce and place commercial messages in front of people. The burgeoning DVR market allows more and more users to not only time shift their content, but to zip right past those commercials the advertisers have paid millions of dollars to place on your favorite show. While the TV networks keep coming up with studies showing that their customers' ads are still buying them some impact with the DVR- generation, a recent survey from DIGDIA shows viewers would pay more for on-demand movie content to avoid commercials entirely.