Thanks Ears...just as I suspected. The key thing is ability & motivations of the two consortiums. HD-DVD camp is led by Toshiba OK, but the two other important mfrs are NEC and Sanyo. NEC is already hedging its bets and purchased a 45% equity stake in a Sony Blu Ray JV. Sanyo is going through a large restructuring excecise due to a lack of profitability. Also note that its not just about DVDs and home entertainment but high capacity storage in recorders and PCs: HP, Dell and Sony are from the IT side of the equations supporting Blu Ray with many others as well all leaning that way. Microsoft is supporting HD DVD for now but only as an optional add on to X Box 360 and the primary reason for supporting it is to battle PS3: but their key issue is market share of X Box itself and narrowing the gap: besides all lose money on the game machines and make money on the games themselves with the long-term objective making these game machines the center of home entertainment systems and digital home at large: thus the standard of Optical Disk Drives is less of a strategic issue for Microsoft and they will end up supporting both as add ons if needed. But for Blu Ray, Sony has developed it and spend R&D etc: there is much more committment: note also Sony is market leader in the ODD market at large: its not just about DVD players. Finally for Intel, again may not a big issue anyway: X Box, Ps3 and the upcoming Nintendo's Revolution all moved from Intel to IBM architecture anyway.
So expect a war during 2006-7 but ultimately the writing is on the wall.