Now, when I say “doomed”, I don’t mean Blu-ray DVDs will be gone by 2010. I’m just predicting that by the time next January rolls around, it will be completely clear to everyone that Blu-ray DVDs are not going to achieve anything close to the success of their standard-definition brethren. In short, Blu-ray DVD’s are not a successor to normal DVDs, and 2010 is going to be the year of the movie download.

In The New York Times article, Blu-ray supporters are optimistic that the falling price of Blu-ray players (i.e. sub-$200) will finally prompt their widespread adoption. Unfortunately, said supporters don’t seem to understand that 2009 is also the year of a giant global recession, and back when we weren’t in the giant recession (like last holiday season), Blu-ray player’s still sold for $400 dollars. Even worse, up until one year ago, Blu-ray was still in the midst of an absurdly drawn out format war with HD DVDs (RIP), which further encouraged sharp-eyed buyers to hold off.

According to Nielsen, about 25% percent of households have a high-definition TV (I got me a big one!), but last November the Wall Street Journal reported that less than 2% of households have a standalone Blu-ray player. Since Playstation 3 also plays Blu-ray DVDs, the percentage of households with Blu-ray buyability is actually closer to 7%, but many of those don’t necessarily HDTVs. Finally, even though it looks like holiday Blu-ray sales were stronger than expected, the number of households with blu-ray players doesn’t appear to have increased by more than 1%.

Now consider the competition: Currently (and while you’re reading this even) you can go to itunes or amazon, download an HD movie, and proceed to watch that movie, in high-definition, on your already high-definition computer screen. You can also connect your computer to your (HD)TV for $25-$50. If you don’t much care for dealing with computers (and really who does), Netflix is more than happy to stream HD directly to your TV, as is vudu, or even the good folks at apple.

All this brings me to my real point: Blu-ray deserves to fail. Besides that irritating format war mentioned up above, Blu-ray is set on pushing antiquated technology. DVDs scratch, and they take up a lot of space, and are slow to start up, and in the case of Blu-ray, you can’t even play them on most computers (to quote Steve Jobs, “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt”). Remarkably, all of these problems would fade away except for the absolute worst, most absurd, totally and completely shortsighted thing about DVDs: it’s ILLEGAL to copy your own DVDs onto your computer. This isn’t to say it can’t be done, you can easily find software that rips DVDs, but because it’s illegal, this extremely desirable feature can’t be built into easy-to-use, super-popular programs like iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Shortly after MP3’s appeared in the mid-90’s, computer hard drives smashed the 10 GB barrier. All of a sudden it became viable for people to keep music collections on their computers. For years, a digitally-inclined individual could continue to buy CDs, copy the songs to their computer, and not worry about investing in a dead format. CD sales, of course, continued to plummet, but at least their decline was graceful. Now that HDs are breaking the 1TB = 1000GB barrier, it would be completely reasonable to rip your newly purchased (Blu-ray) DVDs to a $100 hard drive, and then transfer those movies to your laptop/ipod/tv-media-thingy as needed. Regrettably, the DVD-gods will have none of it, so by 2011, they’ll be finished.

Last night was no exception. My housemate Chris and I found ourselves watching Accepted! on HBO. It features some of the same folks in Knocked Up but lacks the gentle touch of Judd Apatow. The movie is about a group of high school screw ups who start their own university after not getting accepted anywhere else. Thanks to their fake school’s awesome website, a lot of other students start showing up. In the end, an awesomely unstructured education is had by all (it’s just like Brown!)

Accepted is not great, but does it has its moments (often involving explosions). It certainly made me want to see Superbad, and more importantly, it gave me a great idea for the sequel. Instead of college, you have the same thing with grad school. A group of ragtag scientists who didn’t get in to grad school start their own science department in… let’s say an old abandon zoo. The students kick it at the zoo for a while learning about biology, physics, and of course computer science. They invite a bunch of crazy professors who didn’t get tenure to give talks. They find out they can prove theorems while doing keg stands. They also create a bunch of really smart animals. I like Animals.

After about a month at the zoo, they stumble on a major flaw in some nearby university’s plan for particle accelerator. They warn the university, but the stubborn dean of the physics department doesn’t want to listen. In fact, after confronting them at the zoo he takes some photos of some of smart monkey’s who happen to be playing with power tools while smoking. Armed with the photos, he tries to get the grad students kicked out of the zoo, and needless to say the whole conflict culminates in a wacky academic showdown. Basically the whole thing is Animal House meets A Beautiful Mind, with some Old School thrown in as well. Once I write the first few pages of the screenplay, I’m totally dropping out of grad school and moving to a zoo.