The race to 500,000 copies?

[RobertB]

I have been pondering the whole Blu-ray vs HD-DVD situation and was thinking I should share my thoughts with the rest of you (sorry in advance if I wasted your time ).

The way I see things the HD market is still in its infancy. The sales numbers for each title seems to be rather low with the blockbuster titles pushing 250k copies for Blu-ray and 120k for HD-DVD (latest numbers I saw on "300").

But when the market grows and single titles sell upward to 500k copies or more, then I think we can agree that the market has matured and become big business.

Now, all companies in the US has an obligation to maximise profits for its stockholders. If one studio that has been exclusive to the "wrong" side of the format battle (for arguments sake, lets say HD-DVD ). If a title sells over 500k in Blu-ray, how can anyone justify supporting HD-DVD with a similar sale of say 200k copies? The way I see it the exclusivity in such a scenario is severly hampering profits for the shareholders.

So my personal assumption is that the first format to be able to sell 500.000 copies of a given title in North-America is likely the winner, and we will then see the studios (Universal, Paramount/DW etc) shifting stance to support either both formats or just Blu-ray. For the long run it will be best to scrap HD-DVD format at once to solidify the Blu-ray format as the successor to the DVD.

Just my 2cents after too much coffee