The war has barely begun?

[Iron Man]

Many people here seem to be very enthusiastic about this whole format war, following Amazon sales ranks Nielsen/Videoscan numbers and so on. It is always more fun to follow something if you favour one “team” over the other and even more fun when you’re team is winning.

The software numbers favour Blu-ray in a 2:1 advantage over HD-DVD. Personally I do not think this matter too much, since amount of disks sold is still small.

So where does this put us? Well for the one part in this war it’s all barely begining.

HD-DVD:
Maybe more than half a year ago I made a thread on another forum about HD-DVD and what they should do to win this war. Among other things I suggested #1: Stop making stupid combo disks #2: Blu-ray has BD+ and Watermarking, HD-DVD has nothing, and they should start considering extra copy protection, FOX would have liked this #3: Region encoding, a studio like Disney would have liked this. #4: Get more studio support #5: Gain support from larger hardware manufactures.

Sadly for HD-DVD things has not changed a lot since, it is still only Toshiba. They have already reduced the price of there players. Actually they can not do much else then sit and hope for better times. I know Onkyo/Integra has announced HD-DVD players, but again these players are based on the XA2, hence Toshiba again. I know they got Paramount a few weeks ago but if you look at the big picture, one studio will not change anything and can only buy them a little more time. So pleace stop worrying


BLU-RAY:
For this side in the war things are a little different, the PS3 alone could have generated software sales to keep up with HD-DVD. Besides of the PS3 the Blu-ray camp has had stand alone players at twice the price of the HD-DVD’s, none of these are BD profile 1.1 and they still nearly sold as many as the competing format.

This years IFA has confirmed a lot of things. Many hardware manufactures are no longer just a name on a list of contributing members. They showed that they are getting ready to put Blu-ray players onto the market. The support is wide stretching all the way from SONY to Funai continuing to a small design orientated brand like Loewe. No matter what people think, this is a clear sign of who is winning. They do not support/choose Blu-ray for fun!!!

We have already seen what HD-DVD/Toshiba can do, Blu-ray could easily follow the sales of these players. But we are nowhere near seeing the full impact of the broad industry support there is for Blu-ray and the combined effect of the marketing campaigns from all these companies + lower priced players for that matter.

My guess is that over the next 8 month we will see the real begining of the format war!!





My reason for supporting Blu-ray is because I like movies and home theatre. I especially like movies in high definition. I am neither a HD-DVD hatter nor Blu-ray lover. Unfortunately from where I come from I can not rent Blu-ray or HD-DVD movies it is even hard to find a place to buy them. This will not change until a situation with more average adoption of the formats occurs and that will not happen before this stupid “war” is over. I support Blu-ray because everything is pointing at Blu-ray and as a bonus Blu-ray is also the superior format.