http://uk.dvd.ign.com/articles/804/804901p1.html
The folks at FUNimation Entertainment are far more forthcoming than some of their competitors when it comes to their plans for high-def. For starters, they have acknowledged to IGN that they have in fact chosen to go with the Blu-ray format when they do start releasing titles.
"At this point, we are in the Blu-ray camp. We started researching this about a year-and-a-half ago, actually," explains Ward Thomas, Senior VP of Sales and Operations at FUNimation. "We feel that the fanbase and our customers are very much trailblazers on the technology side, so it's something we wanted to get involved in right away. We really felt that the introduction of the PlayStation 3 last year was kind of a foray for our customers and fans to at least get into the next-gen platforms."
Blockbuster Video's recent announcement that it's siding with the Blu-ray format certainly won't hurt FUNimation's plans either."We do a nice business with Blockbuster," says Thomas. "I'll be honest with you. From a retail perspective, Blockbuster is probably pretty much the only place we do a retail business with right now. From an online perspective, obviously we're in business with Netflix and we have a wonderful business with them as well. Most of our rental business is with Blockbuster. Their announcement was just kind of gravy for us since that was the direction we were headed anyway."
Thomas says that the decision did not come lightly to choose Blu-ray over HD DVD. But after much research and exploring of both formats, FUNimation found that the interactive aspects of Blu-ray were much more appealing.
"Some of the demonstrations that we've seen, and just in talking to the different people [developing the format], the long-term interactive scope of Blu-ray just seems to be so much more endearing to at least the fans of the FUNimation content. I just think long-term what we're going to be able to do on a Blu-ray disc from the interactive programming perspective is really intriguing and it opens up a lot of new windows for us. So it was really the direction we wanted to head."