Paramount HD DVD payoff mentioned in Viacom financials

[mjbethancourt]

And while I enjoy Blu Ray, it wasn't a mature of a product as HD DVD and Sony has said that it doesn't care that we all have to re-buy equipment to reach profile 2.0. Features like that were already available in HD DVD.

Re-buy equipment? Have you never heard of a firmware update?

The damage to Paramount is more serious than just upsetting people by favoring a bad format. I for one was quite irritated at having to pay inflated prices (for a short time) to get "out of print" paramount blu-rays, only to learn a month later that they would be back in the game soon. It's a breach of trust, it causes serious disillusionment. Consumers hold grudges over things like that, whether you want to tag them as "Blu-ray Kool-aid drinkers" or not.

Furthermore, many of you are seriously underestimating the lost revenue. Not only were they out of the Blu-ray business for what will be like six months, but they also quickly found themselves out of the HD-DVD business. Also, the data clearly shows that Blu-ray sales picked up rapidly once the format war ended. Had that happened sooner, who knows what Blu-ray sales figures would have looked like over the holiday season. They will never know how much money they really lost. And DVD sales were tanking over the last year, because people stopped buying THOSE waiting for the format war to end. They cost everybody a bunch of money. It was stupid.

Oh yeah:
44,000 Laserdisc titles? Where the crap did that number come from? Without some kind of evidence, I'd be very surprised if it was even a tenth of that number, and most of those are short documentary/educational videos.