I’ve belonged to the school of thought that the HD format war between HD DVD and Blu-Ray was not over. Yes, because of Playstation’s inclusion of Blu-Ray in their systems, the Blu-Ray format has held an advantage in overall market penetration… but those numbers can be deceiving and HD DVD stand alone players have outsold Blu-Ray stand alone players recently. I’ve never thought that HD DVD would win this war, but I’ve believed it wasn’t over yet. I’m not reconsidering that position.
It was announced recently that Warner Bros (I believe the only studio left that was releasing its movies on both HD and Blu-Ray formats) was making the switch to Blu-Ray only. This is nothing short of a devastating blow to HD DVD. Even the HD DVD consortium is pretty much admitting as much. On Friday they cancelled a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vagas and gave the following statement:
Based on the timing of the Warner Home Video announcement today, we have decided to postpone our CES 2008 press conference scheduled for Sunday, January 6th at 8:30 p.m. in the Wynn Hotel. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We are currently discussing the potential impact of this announcement with the other HD DVD partner companies and evaluating next steps.
Wow… that sounds just short of a concession speech. As of right now only Paramount and Universal are on HD DVD, and with the recent switch by Warner to further push things in Blu-Ray’s direction, I can’t imagine it will be too long before either Paramount or Universal either go both formats or Blu-Ray alone.
The count-down, it appears, is on. Looks like we’ll finally have a single HD format… sooner than I thought.
