With Warner Bros just announcing their decision to jump ship and go exclusively Blu-ray disc format for their high-definition video format, you’re probably wondering, “Do I want to pay more for a disc just to see the zits better on Lindsay Lohan’s face? That depends on your own personal fetishes, of course, but apparently with WB being one more major movie house going Blu-ray exclusively, we might not have a choice. (Well, supposedly WB are in breach of contract with Toshiba over ditching the HD-DVD format for Blu-ray.)

No matter that Blu-ray players and discs cost more, I guess. But my first impression (not yet well researched) is that it is a superior format. Problem is, I’ve historically detested Sony as much as Microsoft. Sony often offers consumer devices with their own proprietary, incompatible data/ storage/ content formats. And when they started buying out “content” companies (i.e., music labels and smaller movie houses) years ago, some of us shuddered. The thought was, we’d end up with a company that both controlled the consumer electronics aspect of home entertainment as well as the content. We’d get to a point where we had to take what they gave us, with no options. That day isn’t here quite yet, but it might not be far away.

On the flipside, there’ll probably another company that comes out with something else in the future. When you consider that flash drives are getting larger in terms of storage (but staying their same small size), there are people who believe we won’t have regular hard drives on our computers in the near future. (Why would you need to, if physical drives cannot perform as well and don’t offer that much more storage?) So movies might just become available on 4 Gb flash drives. Then there’s no issue of whether to go Blu-ray or HD-DVD.

That is, if Sony, Warner Bros., Disney and other big movie makers allow flash drive content. (Ignoring the issue of protecting the content on the flash drive from being copied, of course.)