The coming DVD format war

We've hit on this before, but the AP dives into the mess-in-the-making that is the coming war between several competing formats to replace the DVD. Sony has their Blu-ray disc, Toshiba and NEC have the High-definition DVD, Microsoft has its WMV HD standard, and a bunch of Chinese manufacturers are backing the Enhanced Video Disc, or EVD. There's at least one other they neglected to mention, the Forward Versatile Disc. Usually this sort of nonsense about competing formats usually only results in only one thing — lots of pissed off consumers who refuse to buy any of them until a single standard is settled upon — but nobody remembers that there was more than one competing standard for the original DVD, too. And that turned out just fine, didn't it?