Blog From The Bench

Long story short, I spent Friday night in New York City with some of my co-workers. Awesome, awesome place. I tell you, if you've never been, go. Now.

Anyway, we went into the Virgin Megastore on Times Square, which must be the single largest collection of media anywhere in the world. Okay, maybe except an Amazon.com warehouse, so let's make that the single largest collection of media open to the public. I found the high-def section, and was quite amazed. See, in your garden-variety Best Buys or Circuit Citys, they devote roughly the same amount of shelf space to both HD DVD and to Blu-Ray. Thanks to the cost of the players and the range of films I had seen on both formats, I was pretty much convinced that I'd buy a HD DVD player within the next year (or maybe one of the Xbox 360 attachment drives, which I'd then hook to a HTPC). Well, not I'm not so sure. In this bastion of completeness, there was one ten-foot section of HD titles, comprising just about everything I had ever seen on the format (except they were out of stock on Corpse Bride). Moving down the aisle, there were three or four ten-foot sections of Blu-Ray, and I hadn't heard of half the stuff (and considering the HD sections of our upcoming releases requires a lot of hand-tuning, I see most of the stuff that passes through). Now I better be prepared to tell my wife we'll need to spend a lot more money on that next player...