HD DVD to Blu-ray Swap Program

For those self-proclaimed “early adopters” and others who had no clue what was going on…all they knew was “I wanted it” who jumped the gun and ran out and bought HD DVD movies without waiting to see who won the DVD format war, there is a chance for you to save yourself and your pride and get rid of those HD DVDs sitting in a closet collecting dust.

Side note: Now Brotha Tech is one of those self-proclaimed early adopters, but my affinity for all things Sony and my daughter (we were stashing money away for her arrival around the same time the format war was at it’s paramount) saved me from jumping on the HD DVD bandwagon.

The Lowdown:

Warner Bros. has a program that will allow you to swap HD DVD’s for Blu-ray Discs. The program is called Red2Blu and at $4.95 per title and $6.95 for shipping(there is always a catch, albeit a nominal one), you send in your front and back cover art, wait a couple of weeks (tracking number included), and Voila’ your brand-new Blu-ray disc is ready for viewing.

Of course, it isn’t THAT easy, but not terribly complicated either. Just go to Red2Blu.com and select the HD DVD’s you want to trade in. You will receive a confirmation email and a pre-paid postage label. Only one swap per title is allowed and 25 per household. There is a possibility that the title you want to swap is not available; but on the flip side, there might be a deluxe edition title in Blu-ray available for your plain-old HD DVD edition (no extra cost).

In the end, sometimes waiting for the dust to settle is a good thing. But if you’re like me, and dust hitting the groud takes too long, it’s nice to know there are options if your obsessive posessive disorder or O.P.D. (I just made that up, I think) wins over rational, logical thinking.

Entertainment at Your Fingertips…

This information is probably old news to a number of us out there. But I still run into people who haven’t heard about streaming media, so I am gonna let you in on what my family uses for Instant movie entertainment.

The Lowdown: With prices as low as 5 bucks a month, my family depends on Netflix to give us quality movies without the hassle of renting movies from a brick and mortar store (if there are any still around).

You have seen the commercials, so I am going to give you the short version on how the programs works:

• Go to netflix.com and browse the movies you want to watch
• Add the selected movies to your “queue”
• Wait a day, the movie is in your mailbox
• Keep the movie as long as it takes you to watch it
• Send the movie back postage-free, and in a day or two your next movie (according to the order you have arrananged in your queue) arrives.

It is as simple as that. Netflix has now decided that you should be able to watch your movies even faster, so now there are certain titles that you can watch INSTANTLY on your cpu…that’s free as long as you have a membership package It takes about 1 min. to dowload the application that runs in the background only when you que up a movie. So, if you don’t want to wait on the movie to arrive to your home, you can watch it instantly on your desktop or laptop (certain titles only).

Say you don’t want to wait or day or two for you next movie, or you don’t want to sit in the office or huddle around a laptop to watch a movie with the entire family?

Well Netflix has fixed that as well. They now have the ability to stream movie titles to your TV instantly provieded you have an internet connection and a netflix-compatible device hooked to your TV. Pick the titles you want to watch, and the movies (and TV shows) are streamed directly to your TV. The movies take in the neighborhood of 30 seconds to download; so by the time the family is assembled in front of the TV with their snack of choice, the movie is down loaded and ready to go (certain titles only).

Again, there is no extra monthly charge provided that you already have a Netflix membership. The only other key is the Netflix-compatible device that streams the titles from the internet to your TV. The basic model costs about 100 bucks and is sold at most Electronics stores.

Roku Digital Video Player

But, before you go out and purchase one of these devices, you may already have one laying around the house.

These devices include:
Xbox 360

TiVo HD DVR

There are even other devices like Blu-Ray Players and complete Home Theater Systems coming equipped with Netflix compatiblity built in. For more information and for the complete list of current Netflix-capable devices go to Netflix.com

Netflix is just one of the many players in Streaming Media, I and guarantee you that more and more families looking for a quick an easy way to entertain the family on a Friday or Saturday…or any night of the week will be very interested in the future of Streaming Media technology.