Blu-Ray wins on Black Friday week.

[DaViD Boulet]

I am surprised Warner announced this prior to CES, but I guess the whole show thing doesn't matter much to the end result.

There's a very clear strategy in place with that timing. Notice how now HD DVD has canceled their press events at CES. The timing will allow many consumers to have a chance to see the outcome of this format war now, before the May-deadline when Warner's HD DVD contract expires. This will help protect consumers from continuing to invest (for months longer) in a format that is destined to become the "beta" of the HD media struggle. It also creates a great deal of momentum right before and during CES which will help propell high-definition media with trememdous force that it otherwise would not have had if the war kept lingering on, constricting HD sales for months longer.

If Blu-ray wins, I will still for now keep my Toshiba XA2, which is to date the best scaling SD DVD player I own, and I own many..... Several costing over $6K.

Amen. And the price that most folks paid for their A2 is well worth the cost of that very feature... not to mention that those HD DVD discs will look just as great years from now, even if the format ceases to be produced moving forward.

[Mornelithe]

Oh yeah, New Line went BR exclusive also.

http://news.portalit.net/fullnews_wa...u-ray_752.html


And it looks like...GASP...Warner WAS paying attention to PS3 sales, who would've thunk it huh? God, I hate being right so much.

Sarcasm aside though, there're also rumors that Paramount has a piece in their contract w/ HD-DVD that if Warner goes Blu, then they can opt out of their HD-DVD deal. Alot of insiders are predicting Paramount to switch camps really soon.

http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/5237


Morne

[kennyt]

I can't tell you what is going behind closed doors about this format war, but I CAN tell you the buzz at CES was all pro Blu-ray. Every time I heard anyone talking about the formats, the talk was aiming at the death of HD DVD, Warner might have just resolved the format war......

[Mornelithe]

Yeah, not too much has been announced recently, other than claims of HD-DVD's impending doom. Have seen alot of reports of store clerks and such, suggesting people not buy HD-DVD though. Interesting that Toshiba's slashed the prices again on their players, by which I mean, won't they really turn off a huge amount of consumers if HD-DVD does tank? Sure, they may've gotten their player from a gumball machine at that point, but it's still a relative waste of money (provided HD-DVD does indeed tank).


Morne

[DaViD Boulet]

Yeah, not too much has been announced recently, other than claims of HD-DVD's impending doom. Have seen alot of reports of store clerks and such, suggesting people not buy HD-DVD though. Interesting that Toshiba's slashed the prices again on their players, by which I mean, won't they really turn off a huge amount of consumers if HD-DVD does tank? Sure, they may've gotten their player from a gumball machine at that point, but it's still a relative waste of money (provided HD-DVD does indeed tank).

HD DVD players also play and upconvert DVDs. Not to mention that even if HD DVD tanks (which it will), there will still be plenty of titles exclusive to HD DVD for some time.

If you're paying $150 for an HD DVD player that does all that, what's there to complain about? That's the price of a good upconverting DVD player!

[TheMoose]

While trying to write a pro HD-DVD story The Hollywood reporter added these figures at the very end of the story,

The product announcements come in a week when the top 10 high-definition disc sellers are all Blu-ray Disc releases, according to an analysis of Nielsen VideoScan First Alert sales numbers by Home Media Magazine's market research department.

Net HD DVD sales, according to Nielsen, constituted only 15% of hi-def disc sales last week. And the top HD DVD seller, "The Kingdom," sold just 10% as many copies as the top Blu-ray Disc release, "3:10 to Yuma."

Yep that's 10 of the top 10 all Blu-Ray & a 85% to 15% win in software sales.