Comment: HD DVD vs Blu-ray; is the battle over?

Has Warner Bros. sealed the formats fate?

5 January 2008 17:28 GMT / By Stuart Miles

The format war is over, we can all get on with our lives, buy a Blu-ray player and all be happy about it.

Well that's what looks likely to happen following the announcement from Warner Bros. that it would be ditching HD DVD support in favour of an exclusive agreement with Blu-ray.

HD DVD might have the better interactivity, might have had the cheaper player offering, but it seems that wasn't enough when it came to wooing the movie studios.

And so Toshiba, who've been singing the praises of HD DVD for over four years are left holding on to just handful of studio's still supporting the format. But for how long?

The HD DVD format might have big players like Universal, in from the beginning, Paramount and DreamWorks who recently switched, and New Line, but even these alliances now look shakey as well.

In an exclusive interview with Pocket-lint last month, Rachel Banin, product manager of the home video business group at Sony said "We understand that it was only for a set period of time. I think that if the progress of the Blu-ray format continues, Paramount will have to come back."

New Line is owned by Time Warner, who incidentally owns Warner Bros, and therefore likely to switch as well, leaving just Universal and DreamWorks out in the cold supporting the format.

Compare this against movie studios 20th Century Fox, MGM, Lionsgate, Disney, now Warner Bros and of course Sony Pictures plus hardware makers such as Dell, HP, Hitachi, LG, Samsung, and Apple and you can see why HD DVD looks set to fail.

We would love to say it's a shame, that poor Toshiba has been beaten by Sony in what has to be its first format war victory; UMD, MiniDisc, Beatmax, ATRAC anyone? But in reality consumers should be pleased that finally one format has been victorious and that Home Cinema fans can now concentrate on buying a Blu-ray player and getting on with investing in movies.

Of course if Blu-ray has won the victory and the battle, there are further consequences to consider.

What of Microsoft's Xbox 360 HD DVD drive? What of Toshiba's line of HD DVD players. Without movies to play what will become of the players and what will Toshiba do to bring High-def content to those who want it? Opt for Blu-ray? It would be an amazing move and show that the company has plenty of heart, but lets face it, its unlikely to happen.

As for Microsoft, the idea of including a HD DVD player in their console will most likely have been shelved overnight, if they even existed of course.

We will have to wait and see, but one thing for certain, we won't get a response at CES this week. The HD DVD group has cancelled its keynote speech at CES.

We will keep you posted.