So it’s not just me. This Fortune blog article attributes this year’s 2% drop in DVD sales to consumer paralysis over which of the new formats to buy:

Market research showed it wasn’t just NetFlix (NFLX) or Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes hurting traditional DVD sales, either. Consumers who bought HDTVs were so afraid of backing the wrong high-definition movie format that they decided not to buy movies at all.

It’s a phenomenon that would be familiar to anyone who’s read Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice: in our desire to not pick wrong, we often don’t pick at all.

Thanks to Mike Curtis for the link.

With Warners picking Blu-ray, and Paramount rumored to have an escape clause letting it follow right behind, I finally bought my first Blu-ray disc: Big Fish. And a PS3 to play it on.¹

Movies I’ve written are available on both formats, so I didn’t really care who won in the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray battle. I just didn’t want to get stuck with the loser.² Or, better put, I wanted to pick the format that would lose last. Any disc-based format is ultimately going to fall as internet distribution increases. That’s the future. (And a primary issue in the WGA strike.)

Because you’ll ask: The Nines is a standard DVD. While it’s possible that there would be Blu-ray version at some point, it’s not on any calendar.

When I was working with Blue Collar, the folks who developed the menus and special features for The Nines, they were salivating over the sophisticated features you can build into Blu-ray discs, such interactive, animated guides with transparency. Without knowing the real technology behind it, it seems to move beyond the “decision-tree-with-loops” setup of current DVDs and closer to the realm of real programming.

Most of all, Blu-ray discs are big. My dream — which I pitched at last year’s Sundance Film Festival — is to use the extra capacity to include compressed clips of all the original source material, so ambitious viewers could recut the movie on their own systems. That’s a big thing to ask for Sony to support, so reasonable success with this month’s DVD release will be a major factor.

1. Yes, I could have gotten something other than a PS3. But it was a very handy excuse for buying one. You know, for research. ↩
2. Of course, isn’t really “over.” Even if all the studios sign on to Blu-ray, there may be alternative producers (porn, for example) who find a good reason why the other format is better, such as more flexible licensing terms. So here’s hoping that “universal” players are forthcoming, eliminating the confusion much the way the CD-RW+/- has largely gone away. ↩