Random Observations from someone on the fringe of the home entertainment industry

[Jack Torrance]

Okay - I've posted probably far too many times in this forum. I was a "format neutral" type of guy through to about the last quarter of 2006 when the amazing amount of hatred and fud against Blu-ray and the ps3 turned me to an unapologetic blu-ray lover.

I am not in the "home entertainment" part of the industry, but because of what I do, I have a vested interest in one format surviving (and though downloads are perhaps the future, right now I don't want to think about it... too easy to rip off and not enough money to be made for those of us that create content).

Anyway, I just wanted to share some random observations - I hear things and see things in my day to day existence here in la-la land... and just wanted to see if it matched with what anyone else was thinking?

1. Had a meeting over at Warner Bros. the other day. Outside the studio is a bloody big billboard for "Superman II, the Richard Donner cut" ... to which it also said "Coming to DVD and HD DVD" but no mention of blu-ray. Though this title is available on blu-ray. If it wasn't clear before, this certainly lets you know what side of the fence Warner is sitting on in this format war.

2. In my comings and goings, at Universal, when just talking the conversation always comes to other movies and more than once I've heard "Yeah, we're looking at blu-ray over here" (as in "we're going blue-ray"). This seems to connect with what Bill Hunt has been saying... but I'm sure most people reading this will say I'm full of it... but any industry folk who've heard this kind of talk, hey let me know so I don't think I'm going crazy.

3. On the Universal HD channel, they're showing more than a couple Sony movies in HD -- is this a possible future sign that they're already doing business with one another and some kind of blu-ray deal is in the works? Universal HD really only showed Universal/NBC content until just recently (they used to fill the spare time with re-runs of the bloody olympics from years ago).

Anyway, none of these were worthy of seperate emails (or really even this one). Just putting it out into the cosmos and seeing if anyone is listening.