No doubt the biggest news of this week was the death of the HD-DVD format. The end of HD-DVD was finalized when Toshiba stated in a press conference, held in Japan on Tuesday, that it would no longer support the format. By dropping its support for HD-DVD, the high definition format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray was ended.

This now allows for all the movie studios to place their support behind the Blu-Ray format. This is great for consumers because now they can confidently purchase films on Blu-Ray disc knowing that this format will not become obsolete.

And now that the format war is done I believe that the Blu-Ray Disc Association (BDA) needs to do two things if they wish to get mainstream acceptance of their format.

The first action that they need to take is to mandate that all new Blu-Ray players announced after CES 2008 adhere to the profile 2.0 specification. Currently along side the profile 2.0 specification there is also the 1.0 and the 1.1 specification.

A player built with the profile 1.0 specification is able to play any film on Blu-Ray disc, however it cannot access special Blu-Ray disc Java (BD-J) features such as Picture-in-Picture or games. These will only be accessible on a profile 1.1 player because it has the additional hardware needed to make use of these features.

And in the future films may include online interactive features which are available on the internet. However, these will not be accessible to the Blu-Ray player unless it meets the profile 2.0 specifications. The profile 2.0 provides all the features of profile 1.1 and adds internet connection capabilities.

Making all future players meet profile 2.0 specifications will end any possible confusion as to whether or not all the special features of a film will be available on a certain player. Consumers hesitated to purchase Blu-Ray players and discs because of the format war, however they should not now continue to hesitate because of confusion over different Blu-Ray player profiles.

The other thing that the BDA needs to do is to continue with the special promotions and offers such as the buy one get one free incentive. Even though the format war is over the consumer will still need incentives to purchase Blu-Ray discs and promotions such as this can be effective at motivating such purchases.