How Long before Blu-ray is Considered an HD DVD?

And before I begin I am making no assumptions in this thread about Blu-ray failing like HD DVD, or any of that nonsense. What I am talking about is purely of names and identities.

Let’s face it, the average consumer doesn’t take to new names all that often. Sure, DVD wasn’t reverted back to being called VHS, or disc VHS or anything like that, but VHS also wasn’t a disc. DVD shared very few similarities with it’s bulky step cousin twice removed; VHS. Blu-ray, on the other hand does almost the exact same things as DVD only better, and in High Definition. Now that HD DVD is dead, how long will it be before consumers coin the term off onto the victor: Blu-ray?

Before you shout me down pleading to others of my ignorance on the matter you should know that we already saw this type of thing happening even before the format war was over. For those that recall, visitors to Google’s search engine were constantly looking up HD DVD as opposed to Blu-ray, despite Blu-ray maintaining a lead on the sales front (LINK). It makes sense that the name is more popular than Blu-ray because consumers generally know what Blu-ray is; a DVD with high definition content on it, i.e. an HD DVD. Technical garble aside, both are discs that play movies/hold content only one does it in HD. Even the U.S. Government did this in the recent court filings against Blu-ray when they listed in the papers: HD DVD players (e.g. Blu-ray disc players) (LINK).

So is this Blu-ray’s fate? Two, three, five years down the road are we going to be calling them HD DVDs again, despite them really being Blu-rays? I know a lot of you probably think this is inconceivable, but is it really? Consumers (myself included by the way) have definitely done stupider things and, to be perfectly honest, do we even need the Blu-ray name? The war is over. Fancy names aside if you were to look at a Blu-ray disc and a DVD would you notice any real differences in them? I doubt it…