There will be plenty of post-mortems on the end of the format war, but for now let’s point out what did not happen: broadband-delivered HD content did not make optical discs irrelevant.
Many people speculated that the format war was a sideshow, that packaged media would be over-taken as content moved online (Reason Magazine’s Tim Cavanaugh described the contest as people battling to be “the next mayor of Pompeii.”).
But with a winner clearly established, and with on-demand HD video downloads no where near maturity, there is plenty of time for HD packaged media to penetrate the market.