The HD format wars could be reaching an end. That’s right, the end is in site. The winner? It looks like BluRay has come out on top. Yesterday, Warner Home Video announced it’s exclusive move to BluRay. The studio was formerly on the fence and had released titles for both formats. It’s now being reported that New Line, a subsidiary of Warner, has gone Blu as well. Both are huge hits to the HD-DVD camp, and they didn’t take the news well.
The HD-DVD press event for CES has been cancelled. That’s right, they’re entire press conference, cocktail party, and after parties have been canceled. I know they need to come at this from a big PR standpoint and need time to prepare, but canceling your only press event at the world’s biggest consumer electronics event? Yeah, doesn’t look good for the format.
Rumor has it that Paramount is looking for a way out of their exclusive contract with HD-DVD to move over to BluRay as well. And with recent stats showing the sales of players and movies for BluRay are trouncing the sales of HD-DVD, how can you argue the move?
Only time will tell, but ending the format war can only benefit the customer. I highly doubt Microsoft is going to release that Xbox 360 Ultimate given this news (if they were going to announce it anyway).
eh, I guess that’s good. I would have liked for them to make it for both formats but this is probably more cost efficient. One winning is really good anyways b/c you don’t have to worry about what others are using, say when you bring a movie over to a friends.
Sweet. Even though I wanted HD-DVD to win, I’m not going to complain. All the sony fanboys are going to flip out, but congratulations to sony for not getting fucked in the ass like they did with Betamax
They fixed the problems that made betamax a problem before (VHS was easier / cheaper to pirate, and you could get more space for cheaper). They came out with a disk that has more space then its competitor, pretty much costs the same prices in terms of DVD sales, and really advertised it well.
I’m happy that is over though.
The way I see it, the hop this format took over DVD is not enough to get Joe Consumer to buy a player anyway. VHS to DVD was an enormous leap in technology and capacity, and although HD-DVD/BluRay hold a ton more than DVD, it’s just not enough IMHO.
Good news for Sony. And yea the average Joe won’t be buying a Blu-ray player quite yet. But TV’s are being pushed to 1080p and are becoming alot cheaper, I think in a few years we might see 42″ LCD 1080P tv’s selling for 6 or 700 dollars. It will be a slow transition, but give it a few years and I bet you half the people will move from DVD to Blu-ray. And ofcourse once bandwidth catches up we will have some wireless satelite 1080p movie downloading service where we store all are movies on one central server that can be viewed simultaneously from any TV in the house.