Blu-Ray/HD DVD Disc Titles: Is That All There Is?

So yesterday, to the surprise of absolutely no one, I marched into my local electronics store and picked up an HD DVD add-on drive for my Xbox 360 (newly discounted to $180—a whopping $20 savings). I hooked it up to my game console, and beheld the razor-sharp picture of the included "King Kong" disc (yeah, it's pretty sweet). But I wanted some more movies too, so I checked out the HD DVD selection at Best Buy—a single, four-foot section of one aisle. Same for Blu-ray, too.

This isn't news to anyone who's owned a Blu-ray or HD DVD player for awhile, and yes, I've seen the numbers before, but the reality didn't sink in until yesterday, when I was finally HD DVD shopping for myself. I've now thoroughly combed through the slim pickings both online and in stores, and I've become depressingly familiar with all the major titles out there. "Click," "Casino Royale," "RV," "Goodfellas," "The Lake House," the "Matrix" movies (boxed set only, of course), the "Fast and the Furious" saga (all three of them, brah), "Swordfish," "Waterworld"...I keep on looking, and I keep seeing these titles (and a few dozen more) over and over. I've attended weddings with more people than there are Blu-ray or HD DVD titles.

Just to make sure I wasn't looking in the wrong store, I did a little test at Amazon: I browsed to both the "All HD DVD" and "All Blu-ray" sections and checked the results. For HD DVD? Three hundred and seventy two...total. Blu-ray came in a shade higher at 429 titles. Then I went to the DVD section and found 23,152 titles—in the "Drama" section alone.

Today's meager landscape of Blu-ray/HD DVD titles reminds me of 1998: the year when I bought my first DVD player (actually, it was a Pioneer combo DVD/Laserdisc player, which set me back about $800). Back then, I'd waltz into Tower Video and find, maybe, a 15-foot DVD aisle, which I'd picked over pretty thoroughly within a week or so. It was pathetic, really, but then again, those were the Wild West days of DVD, and it took about two or three years for things to really take off.

Now, don't get me wrong—I'm not disappointed with my purchase. I'm an inveterate early-adopter, and I'm actually surprised it took me so long to buy an HD player of either format. I've lived with a poor DVD title selection before, and I'll do it again for this new generation of players (that's kind of my job, anyway).

That said, here's my advice to those of you on the fence about getting a Blu-ray or HD DVD player (gadget freaks and early adopters notwithstanding): forget the "who's-going-to-win-the-format-war" nonsense, the dropping prices, and the varying studio support for each HD camp. Instead, go online and take a close look at the paltry disc selection. If you can live with the puny offerings, then by all means, jump right in. If not, you should resign yourself to a long wait—maybe, oh, three or four years, until the number of titles approaches something in the thousands. And by that time, of course, we'll be downloading all our movies anyway.