I recently visited Microsoft and was fascinated to learn that their vision of the Media Center goes way beyond buying a PC to stick in an entertain center cabinet. Instead, they envision all manner of devices embedding media center technology.
It looks like the 2 camps just can't play nice. There had been talks between Blu-Ray advocates Sony & Matsushita and HD-DVD key player Toshiba to end the format war before it started - by introducing one standardized format for the next generation of optical discs.