Will Blu-ray be supported by 2050? - dangers of digital obsolescence

[HyperBear]

Today's disc drives can't read HD DVD. How do we know that drive vendors won't stop supporting Blu-ray in future? If optical drive manufacturers can simply "cut off" HD DVD, why wouldn't they cut off Blu-ray once that is considered "obsolete"?

HD DVD couldn't co-exist with Blu-ray like DVD+R and DVD-R did - a possible reason:

When the DVD+R was released, DVD-R was already widely established, so it managed to co-exist with DVD+R.

For the same reason, CDs were not suddenly discontinued when the "next big thing", the DVD came out, and disc drives retained backwards compatibility because almost everyone still owns CDs, mainly for audio because CD quality is already sufficient for the human hearing capability. There is not much that can be improved because audio is a far simpler technology than video, where as the original video formats (VCD and DVD) were well below the human viewing ability.

Also, DVD+R and DVD+R DL had the same capacity as their minus counterparts. From the point of view of the user, capacity is the main selling point. The average consumer does not understand the technical details under the hood, stuff like pre-gaps and pre-pits and pre-grooves and ATIP/ADIP and wobble frequencies that DVD+R had improved upon.

But HD DVD and Blu-ray "entered the race" at a similar time. None of them was widely established. HD DVD predated Blu-ray by just three months (March 2006 vs. June 2006).

HD DVD had no chance of winning against Blu-ray solely due to having significantly less capacity (15 GB vs. 25 GB). Its benefits were the lack of region locking, the existence of HD DVD-RAM (no BD-RAM counterpart exists), and a more robust centered data layer, but the average consumer does not understand those anyway, so it could not be mass-marketed as a selling point.

Even after HD DVD was discontinued, normal DVDs were not discontinued because they are far cheaper than HD DVD and Blu-ray, and because they were compatible with the devices that people already owned.

Perhaps because there was a competition, each format was forced into becoming more consumer-friendly, so HD DVD was in effect a launch pad for Blu-ray. HD DVD forced Blu-ray to become a better format, so we have to thank HD DVD for making Blu-ray better.

What are your thoughts on this?