A news story over at Yahoo caught my eye this morning, claiming that the Blu-Ray format is going to win the format war.
Forrester Research on Wednesday declared Blu-Ray…as the winner in an increasingly heated battle over next-generation DVD technology…
… it is now clear to Forrester that the Sony-led Blu-ray format will win,” said Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler in a report.
Strangely there’s not much to really back this up, however personally I do agree, they are set to have the most players in homes by the middle of next year and that’s what counts. Bums on seats. The other thing that makes me think that this might be a decent report is the comment regarding our buy in:
“Unless the HD-DVD group abandons the field, it will be another two years before consumers are confident enough of the winner to think about buying a new format DVD player. In the meantime, they will expand their video on-demand, downloadable video, and Internet viewing habits,” he said.
Spot on. I think we’ve seen that from all the comments throughout the posts about the format war. People are going to wait. However Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will still get into homes through stealth – PC’s, XBox’s and PS3’s.
Warner made this tentative announcement some time ago. Paramount did the same but ultimately switched to the one format, it’s a kind of hedging your bets. Until Warner are happy they are backing the right format they won’t commit.
HD-DVD had more momentum when it had the exclusive backing of some of the movie studios, but today warner has joined paramount in announcing that they will release films in both HD-DVD + blu-ray. this means that, apart from universal, every single major movie studio will be releasing their films in at least blu-ray, with most studios pledging themselves exclusively to blu-ray. this fact, plus the probable massive sales of the ps3, will seemingly make blu-ray the “winner” in this bullshit battle. here’s an article w/ more info:
http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6276046.html