A lot of people have been chiming in on the HD-DVD/BluRay debate, about which one is better. I think one thing everyone has been missing was something Bill Gates said back in January 2006 at CES:

The last thing I want to show here that I’m excited about in HD-DVD, is a feature that is part of every HD-DVD, which is that it enables digitally legal copies to be stored on the hard drive of a device like a PC. In this case I can go to the menu, choose manage copies, there are offers that are available here from Universal, in this case I’m going to choose to copy the high definition movie, rather than the full disk image, and you can see here a user interface has popped up that enables me to complete this, the high definition movie is being copied to my hard drive, and now I can put the shiny disk away somewhere safe, and have complete access to my movie library in a compelling, exciting way, as I get more and more of these high-def HD-DVDs.

Movie companies hate this. Sony caved in to get studios to adopt the BluRay format, while HD-DVD is taking a more progressive approach and embracing technology rather than stifling it. As we are moving toward a society where everything is digitally distributed, doesn’t HD-DVD sound like the best approach?