Year 2006 roundup
It is traditionally the time to quickly wrap up the most important events that happened in the digital entertainment industry during the year 2006 and also to take a quick look at what happened at AfterDawn.com as well.
Video freaks all over the world had been waiting and waiting and waiting for the "next DVD" to arrive for almost 5 years, the process being delayed several times. Furthermore, the original idea of having just one format that would eventually replace the DVD-Video format was thrown out during the process and it was already obvious that the emulation of DVD's rapid adoption rate would never happen with the next gen format. But, after five years of waiting, we got our high definition formats -- HD DVD and Blu-ray were both launched during the year 2006.
Understandably, considering the device price tags and the lack of content, the adoption rate hasn't been very quick. But to complicate the things, it seems that the good olde DVD is "good enough" for most people (which wasn't the case when DVD began to replace VHS as the major format -- DVD was simply so much better and VHS wasn't really "good enough", not even for Joe Average). Furthermore, to get a better picture quality when switching from the VHS to the DVD, it was simply matter of purchasing a new player. With high def formats, people also need to have a proper HD capable television set, making the new formats harder to sell until the HDTV sets become truly mainstream products (mind you, the high def players only output high def video when connected via HDMI and older HD capable TV sets might not have HDMI connectors at all, complicating things even further..).
