Saturday, January 05, 2008

The Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD Battle is Over

With the recent announcement that Warner Brothers would be adopting Sony's Blu-ray HD format over Toshiba's HD-DVD format does this mean the end to the format wars that brought back memories of Beta vs. VHS?

According to the Bits blog at the New York Times:

"Warner Brothers is now going to throw its weight behind the Blu-ray format for high-definition disks. Warner has been the only major studio to publish its movies in both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. Today, the studio announced that from now on, it would only issue movies in Blu-ray. "

This is the final blow to HD DVD because Warner Brothers is #1 in DVD market share. The impact of this announcement has sent reverberations through the industry. The HD-DVD group hastily cancelled press events scheduled for the upcoming CES trade show.

This move is a great sign for the DVD business as the battle was delaying the growth of HD disks. Now with Warner in the fold, Blu-ray can make some headway and the DVD business as a whole can look for brighter days coming down the pike.

Unfortunately those consumers who purchased their first HD-DVD player this Christmas are going to be a little un-happy. Maybe they can blow them out on eBay.