The war between the Blu-ray and HD DVD for mat may boil down to which format has the most under $500 players by the holidays, according to Business Week on Friday.

After all the technical infighting and marketing wars, it may come down to just that. The reason is because it has been very hard for consumers to distinguish visually between the two formats. They both look pretty good when properly set up on an HDTV.

At one time, it was thought that the adult movie industry would hold sway over the success of one format, as it did in the Betamax/VHS war of the 1980s. But nowadays, a lot of content is available on the Internet, and the disc formats don’t carry the weight they once did.

James McQuivey, a principal analyst at Forrester Research has concluded that, "Without a clear winner, consumers are confused. And confused consumers wait for clarity. If they don’t get that, then they’ll settle for cheap."

The rationale is that, for those not into downloading from the Internet, at a certain price point, it doesn’t matter which player the customer buys. "People were waiting for a decision, "Mr. McQuivey said, "and, because there isn’t a decision, they are waiting for price, so it doesn’t matter if they make a bad decision."

However, a bigger war is looming. While all this indecision takes place in the format war, and manufacturers struggle to reduce the prices and perhaps come out with a dual-mode player, they may have dropped focus on the real enemy.

Chris Crotty, senior consumer electronics analyst at iSuppli summed it up. The two camps, "have spent so much time and effort fighting each other and they should be battling their common enemy, which is online delivery."