I guess it was kinda expected, and NEC did it. They have just developed a chip capable of reading both Blu-ray and HD-DVD media. Yes, we all know. One of these two new optical formats was destined to become the latests and greatest in optical storage. Now it would appear that they've both won. Sort of?

It's not like this dual read chip design is anything new. Broadcom also developed a chip that handles both formats, but its creation had both of the standards encoded within it. Somewhat akin to a firmware flash. According to ArsTechnica, this new NEC chip has the integrated circuitry to handle the drives internal logic beyond media stream decoding. And for added bonus, this new chip somewhat ties with Ricoh's quad-mode laser. This laser can handle both the reading, and perhaps even the writing of both the HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats.

This might be enough to convince consumers to start purchasing new Hi-Def players. Though these dual players (and perhaps someday, dual writers) aren't out yet, one set top box would be easier than two. It is expected that one dual format player would be cheaper than a single format player, but far cheaper than shelling out for two stand alone units.

Though this does come with but a single provision. Sony will have to relax some of its licences where applicable to Blu-ray. To maintain some portion of the optical market share, I expect they will.