Yes... Another One!

[Petra_Kalbrain]

I know that these type of articles are re-hashing what WE already, and the general public are finally starting to, know. However, I thought that the last line was particularly well spoken. It's something that you don't often hear as writers like to avoid making this blatant a comment. I highlighted the text that put a smile on my face after reading through the bunch of stuff that everyone else writes about when dealing with this subject.

Massive technology research house Gartner says that the HD format war that has been raging for nearly two years will end in 2008. Guess who they think will take the prize?

Despite the HD-DVD camp's recent protestations to the contrary, Gartner believes that the war between Toshiba's preferred HD format and Sony's competitive Blu-ray technology will be won by Blu-ray and that it will happen this year.

Even though there have been massive price cuts on HD-DVD hardware - especially stand-alone players produced by Toshiba - Gartner feels that these measures will simply draw out the inevitable conclusion of a battle to decide what may be the last physical format on which people will buy their movies or TV shows.

The primary reason for HD-DVD's predicted demise that Gartner cites in their report is a lack of support (and therefore movie titles) from the major studios.

It has been speculated that this would be a nearly insurmountable hurdle to overcome since Warner Brothers announced their exclusive support of the Blu-ray format immediately before the opening of the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month. The announcement spurred wild speculation as to Paramount's commitment to the format.

Indeed, consumers seem to already smell the blood and have recently given far more of their dollars to the Blu-ray format.

Apart from consumers who have already purchased an HD-DVD player and/or movies, the biggest group to be potentially impacted by a Blu-ray victory is Microsoft, who have backed the HD-DVD format since its inception and continue to sell HD-DVD player add-on hardware for their popular XBox 360 video game console system. Should the HD-DVD format fail, Microsoft would have to license the Blu-ray technology from competitor Sony in order to maintain viable HD movie playback on their console.

Source: http://www.sync-blog.com/sync/2008/0...r-declare.html