Friday, February 15, 2008

Blu-Ray Unofficial Winner of Format War

Well, it looks like Michael Bay's wish has come true. Today the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart announced that by June 2008, it would sell only Blu-Ray discs and players marking the unofficial death of the HD-DVD format. This, along with Best Buy, Blockbuster, and Netflix declaring their intent to go Blu-Ray, its all over except Toshiba throwing in the towel (which they are rumored to do soon).

The end of the war began when the Blu-Ray camp successfully bribed Warner Bros with $300 million the balance of power squarely onto their side and hasn't moved since. Now with the retailers announcing defections, it is over. So for you with HD-DVD players and disc, you soon will own a piece of history. Don't buy any new movies either; soon the ones that exist will be on clearance anyway. In the end, it seems those that are willing to bribe the most, won. I am just glad I sat this format war out but I do wish that consumers, not bribery, had been the deciding factor.

1 comment:

  1. I was multiformat for about a year, and I'm just glad there is a format winner. Now we can get on with the whole HD thing.

    And the whole anger over the bribing thing is just silly.

    Both sides made their bribes. Paramount was bribed big time as well to be HD DVD exclusive.

    But I doubt the all the retailers you speak of were bribed. Huge companies like Wal-Mart and Best Buy don't need a bribe to go format exclusive. They just wanted things to end and saw what the consumers were telling them.

    And the consumers HAVE spoken. Have you not been keeping up with the sales charts?

    Blu-ray discs outsold HD DVDs by somewhere between 2 to 1 and 3 to 1 for 2007.

    That sounds like speaking pretty loud and clear to me.

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