It’s been two weeks since Toshiba, creators and primary backers of the nascent next-generation movie disc format called HD DVD, ceased production and marketing of the technology, ceding defeat in a bitter format war raged between it and Blu-ray Disc, championed by a Sony-led consortium.

This move was widely expected following January’s announcement by Warner Home Video that it will be supporting Blu-ray Disc exclusively going forward. As the number one movie studio in the world, Warner Bros. commanded immense weight in deciding the outcome of this war, and once their announcement was made, it took less than two months for companies at every level of the home video distribution ecosystem to fall in line behind it, abandoning HD DVD in the process and leaving Toshiba holding the bag.

So now that Blu-ray Disc is poised to become the dominant next-generation movie format, it’s time to look to the future. A future that, quite frankly, looks somewhat bleak for a number of reasons.

In a Blu-ray dominated future, expect high prices, because everything about Blu-ray is far more expensive than its HD DVD counterparts. The players will be expensive thanks to costly laser pickups, complicated hardware and an even more complicated software stack that will require extensive support from the manufacturers. The discs will be expensive thanks to the relatively high cost of manufacturing discs, and the sky-high costs of authoring them using BD-J.

Expect limited selection, in part because of the high costs of creating a commercial Blu-ray Disc, but also (and far more troubling) because of the requirement for all BD-ROM titles to have AACS encoding before they can play. The costs of acquiring these licenses and the complications of implementing them will shut out many smaller, indie film studios from BD publishing, resulting in a catalog filled with generic, big-budget Hollywood crap.

Expect a poor movie-watching experience. Blu-ray Disc players have already shown themselves to be exceedingly slow at performing all but the most basic of tasks. Starting a movie can take minutes; navigating menus is fraught with problems, and when you get to the actual movie itself, actions such as pausing, rewinding, fast-forwarding and chapter skip can take seconds to register.

Expect to babysit your Blu-ray player like it’s a computer. All of today’s Blu-ray players receive frequent firmware updates to fix bugs in new movies. These updates have to be downloaded from the Internet and burned on to a CD which is then inserted in the player. The updates can take upwards of 40 minutes, and are required in many cases to watch new movies.

Expect planned obsolescence. Think the Blu-ray player you buy in 2008 will continue to play discs released in 2011? Don’t count on it; either the manufacturer will have ceased releasing firmware updates by then, or new movies will be authored for some future Blu-ray specification that your player won’t support (there are already three such specifications, version 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0, each of which support different feature sets that must be implemented in hardware—they can’t be bolted on later with firmware updates.)

And expect to be treated like a criminal. Blu-ray features multiple levels of DRM, ROMmark brands discs with unique serial numbers that can’t be duplicated using consumer disc burners, AACS encrypts the video stream and its Image Constraint Token capability allows the movie studios to artificially cripple the analog output capability of your player, and BD+ locks you out of the movie until it has scanned your player to make sure nothing’s “wrong.” Combined with the internet connectivity features of BD Profile 2.0, BD+ has some scary privacy implications as well, such as reporting your movie selections and viewing habits to a third party. Blu-ray also maintains the region protection seen in DVD (though Blu-ray only has three regions.)

The alternative offered by HD DVD, while not perfect, was decidedly more consumer-friendly and much better implemented. HD DVD simply offered a better moviewatching experience, for less money, and it did so from day one.

Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic. Maybe I’m biased. I won’t deny that this article was prompted in no small part by my dismay at how events played out in the so called “format war.” But I’ve found my pessimism reinforced somewhat in recent weeks.

At CES, Sony announced that it would allow consumers to make portable copies of its Blu-ray movies for viewing on the go… but with a catch; the Blu-ray player would have to be a PlayStation 3, and the portable player would have to be a PSP. Gee, thanks, Sony. HD DVD, by comparison, required all players to support Managed Copy which would work with a wide variety of portable players and media servers (when provided for by the movie publisher.) And on March 5, Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow is reported to have said Blu-ray players will not come down to $200 until next year—HD DVD players had already shattered that price barrier last Christmas.

Aside from Toshiba’s capitulation, there has been precious little really good news from the Blu-ray camp in recent weeks. And without the competition posed by HD DVD, sales on Blu-ray discs have dried up, and prices on Blu-ray players have risen ever so slightly. There is no reason to expect that situation to change any time soon.

Maybe I’m wrong, and Blu- ray will turn out OK. But I’m not holding my breath, and neither should you.

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