If you’ve ever followed or studied the stock market, you’re probably aware that certain companies and products end up being good indicators about what’s coming a few months later in the economy for a particular industry. For example, an increase in orders for construction materials means that more homes or buildings are being built, which means that business conditions for people buying homes or buildings must be improving as well. Or let’s say a company makes a kind of machine that’s used in manufacturing electronics equipment. Higher sales of their machines means that their customers (consumer electronics manufacturers) are ramping up production of whatever products they make with these new machines. In either case (construction or electronics), it means that consumers will be getting those products a few months later, and a few months after that, we’ll hear that the industry had a good sales period.

In a similar way, you might have heard about the following products on the gadget websites in the last few days or weeks (or months):

• Toshiba Qosmio Laptop gets 0.5-inch HDDVD-RW Drive
• Acer announces HD DVD-equipped laptop with 20-inch screen
• HP Pavilion dv9000t HD DVD-equipped laptop gets good reviews (Editor’s choice at PC Magazine)
• Alpine and Toshiba demonstrate automotive HDDVD player

What’s important about these products? Especially that last one, which isn’t even coming out for over a year?

It’s all about proliferation of the HD DVD format. The more often a consumer sees a brand, the more of an impression it’s likely to make on them. Now that wide-screen LCD displays are becoming the norm, watching movies on laptops and desktops has become much more practical and many more people are doing it. For just a couple hundred dollars more, you get a laptop which has the added bonus of being your high-def DVD player and screen.

Today, many laptops and desktops have HD DVD drives as optional equipment, but Toshiba has announced plans to make them standard in their 2008 laptops. I’m sure this will become a trend that other manufacturers also follow. In fact, HP has started offering a dual-format drive for their machines (we’ll talk more about dual-format in a future posting).

For HD DVD fans, news about laptop and desktop computers shipping with drives in that format is very good news. It means that the format is on its way to being more ubiquitous (more commonly available), which translates into some additional support and longevity for the platform. It means that no matter how strong Blu-ray sales ever become, the studios will not be able to easily ignore the large numbers of potential customers who have chosen or have access to HD DVD.

Now, what about that automotive HD DVD player that’s not even coming out for another year? The significance of this device goes back to that idea about indicators. It’s not about the HD – you most certainly would NOT be able to appreciate it on a 7 or 10-inch screen – but about the projected popularity of the HD DVD format. Alpine is a major manufacturer of automotive electronics, and this product demonstrates that they expect customers to be building large enough HD DVD collections, that when these customers go on the road, they’re likely to bring some HD DVD discs. These players will also be used for regular DVDs as well – don’t forget, all HD DVD players play conventional DVDs too.

All of these indicators should provide reassurance to new HD DVD owners, or perhaps convince some more format-war fence-sitters, that the HD DVD format is here to stay and is not going away any time soon.