Warner Bros tilts High Def DVD's to Blu-Ray

The New York Times reports that Warner Brothers has now lined up in Blu-Ray DVD corner effectively giving the Sony format about 70% of the high definition DVD market. They'll continue to release movies on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray until May and then switch exclusively over to Blu-Ray. This leaves Universal and Paramount along with Dreamworks as the only major studios backing HD-DVD.

As a production company that had to jump into Blu-Ray production in support of one of our clients, this is welcome news for us. I have to say, if you have not seen Pixar's "Cars" and "Rattatoule" on Blu-Ray disc, you have not seen the true capabilities of Blu-Ray. Jaw dropping is the only way I can describe what these movies look like in HD. Better than what it looked like in the theater.

Full article on the New York Times website.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/technology/05disc.html?ex=1200200400&en=306157434b73e7fb&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Note that there are some companies...in some industries....who do very well by bucking the prevailing platform. Indeed, the range of their creativity is perhaps extended by their freedom to operate outside the lowest common denominator of platform consensus -- even if it means that their hardware has virtually no points of compatibility with the prevailing platform apart from basic connectivity.

 
I'll also observe that there are some in that very position who have managed to sustain years of highly profitable business, growing far more quickly than the industry as a whole, even while expanding market share only 2%, up to a total of 5%. Nothing at all like the relatively overwhelming possibilities that 30% market share provides.

Random notes: Paramount had been staunchly in the Blu-ray camp until it switched to HD DVD in August; Sony CEO Howard Stinger calls the contest a stalemate, and said if he could go back in time to avert the format war, he would, even if it meant delaying going HD at all; HD DVD is still winning the standalone player race....

...and it doesn't really matter much in the end. If the client pays us well enough to do the job with sock puppets, we do it with sock puppets....even if it turns out that marionettes win the puppet wars.

BTW, not that I'm an HD DVD fan boy or think it will "win." I'm enjoying my uprezzing DVD player that cost less than the first 5 high def disks I'd buy. 

 As Jaye (Tommy Lee Jones) said in Men in Black, looking at a revolutionary new music storage medium, "All I know is that it means I'm going to have to buy another copy of the White Album."