HD-VMD. There’s a name you probably won’t remember since none of the major studios are signed on board to support the format yet, but it isn’t completely without potential, especially considering the text I bolded below.

Variety (emphasis mine):

Initial HD VMD discs will have similar capacity as the first hi-def discs released by the majors. But players will cost much less: Next month, the company will release software enabling users to play the discs on their computers, likely for free. Actual players cost less than than $300 — a significant savings vs. the $500 to $800 HD DVD players or the $1,000 Blu-ray decks — due to lower manufacturing cost.

With Microsoft already fortified on the HD-DVD front and Sony with Blu-Ray and a smattering of major studios choosing sides where does this leave HD-VMD? Without major studio content support can HD-VMD be a contender? The nmeinc.com website succeeds in telling us how great it is, but the online store simply carries the sometimes ominous words: “coming soon.”

It seems silly to suggest HD-VMD has any chance, but compared against Blu-Ray and HD-DVD which aren’t exactly off to a disruptive start replacing — or even supplementing — DVD, almost anything is possible. I’m still going with DVD not being seriously threatened by any of the HD options available to date. Yes, the high and low end technophile crowd will continue to eat up HD, but we’re still a couple years away from the mainstream public en masse buying into a different physical format than DVDs. And I still think the replacement format will be something without moving parts and vastly more storage space like holographic or perhaps even protein based storage.

Moving parts wear out. Think of the heads of a VCR and tape versus the replay factor in a DVD and there was a definite advantage since nothing was physically touching the DVD (yes, the laser is reading it, but there is no head on the DVD essentially wearing it down with each play). Surely there is some theoretical limit of wearing out a DVD as the more cycles it will eventually weaken and crack, but it is nothing to the effect of taping running across a head. Also, it can be rough on CD/DVD media just taking it out of the protective case.

Now imagine something that doesn’t require spinning of the media. Imagine a credit-card sized object being able to hold your entire families music and movie libraries. Something like that would be disruptive media, not yet another spinning object of any kind read by more effective lasers.

• Blu-ray movie disc format to be in Playstation 3
• Paramount to use HD-DVD only except for Spielberg films
• Holographic storage vs. DVD in 2006
• Three years = poor sales for DVD-audio and SACD
• Cheaper Blu-Ray players on the way, still too expensive to matter
• XM and Sirius, side-by-side feature comparison