This is something that has worried be for quite some time. I was searching the net for Space Above and Beyond DVD news and found this:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/011404htfchat.html

A chat transcript from Jan 2004 from Fox's Peter Staddon, Senior Vice President of Marketing

I was scrolling down and found this:

[Nils_Luehrmann] Peter, First of all thank you for your generosity in sharing your time with us this evening and your tremendous support of DVD. Kudos on the new Alien Box Set and your terrific Studio Classics Series. Considering the rapid development of HiDef DVD and the roll-out of both Blu-Ray Disc and HD-DVD players, what are Fox's plans regarding this highly anticipated new DVD format and how soon can we hope to see HiDef DVD releases from Fox?

[peterstaddon] Hi Def DVD is probably the biggest strategic issue facing all studios at the moment. The first thing we need to be clear about is that we will insist on copy protection standards before committing to support any new format. We are in regular discussions with the Blu Ray group as well as the blue laser AOD 264 group, and both of the products have their strengths and weaknesses but the bottom line is that we haven't been convinced of adequate CP standards on either format and so cannot commit to support any on at this stage. I would love to launch HD DVD as the picture quality is stunning, and imagine what you could do with 30 - 50GB of disk space. It will happen eventually, it is inevitable but we need to sort out some key issues in the next year. If we don't get this right the home entertainment market as we know it will be under serious pressure and if it was impacted in the same way the music industry has been by piracy, then the golden age of Hollywood that we are all currently enjoying will come to an end.

This isn't anything that hasn't already been obvious, we all know that the reason HD DVD is taking so long is mainly the fight between the next two DVD standard's and that the second big reason is the copy protection issue but it was interesting to find a post from someone from the major studios.

I buy alot...I meant ALOT of TV DVD's. Almost no standalone movies any more because I can get 1000mins of TV with more story for $50 than I could from a 120min movie for $25. The biggest reason I've been buying so much is that I can buy these movies and know that in the future I can back them up and modify them to suit my uses, another reason is that I want to get these movies before "T3h Big LockDown", where we most likely won't be able to backups these movies.

I find it quite likely that the next DVD format will take quite awhile (if ever if the computer/DVDplayer market use differing DVD standards) to crack and even so will probably be quite expensive and extremly time consuming. This will be so far in the future that we'll probably have nothing to worry about until 2010 or something so it's good to know that I'll have plenty of movies that I own that I can do whatever I want to with.