Blu-ray tag

Recently US retailer Best Buy and internet movie rental company Netflix had announced they will be recommending Blu-ray over HD DVD and no longer stock HD DVD products. Then just yesterday Wal Mart announced its intentions to drop HD DVD products.

Now it is being reported that Toshiba itself is pulling the plug on the ailing format. While not officially confirmed from Toshiba itself, it has already been reported that the manufacturing plants in Japan are closing.

While the format was released earlier than Blu-ray, and devices being dramatically cheaper than Blu-ray devices (the cheapest Blu-ray player for a while being the PlayStation 3), it lost much support from movie studios last year when they were starting to jump to one format or another. Blu-rays were also outselling HD DVDs sometimes as high as 4:1.

There are two movie studios that only produce HD DVD movies, so it would be thought that the rumoured “escape clause” would probably have something to do with Toshiba or another one of its partners announcing its pull-out from the race.

Financial Times reports that Paramount Studios is going to use its escape clause to get out while it still can.

Meanwhile, since Warner went Blu, there have been many rumours that Universal Studios will also use its escape clause to jump in.

It seems that 2008 will declare Blu-ray the winner of the high definition disk format wars, and we can finally rest easy knowing our expensive Blu-ray players and PlayStation 3’s have a future.

Update
Here is the Financial Times article which says,

Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner Bros backing Blu-ray

But it isn’t known if Dreamworks (who is owned by Viacom who also owns Paramount) signed a similar deal.

It has been a battle of the High Definition formats for some time now and it looks like HD-DVD will be suffering a slow and horrible death. Warner Brothers has just announced that they will be going exclusively with Blu-Ray from May.

Warner Bros. is the fifth studio to go with Blu-Ray exclusively, while HD-DVD only has two supporters left standing, Universal Studios and Paramount Studios.

There have been lots of highs for the Blu-Ray format over the past year. The launch of the PlayStation 3 helped propell sales of Blu-Ray to outsell HD-DVD 3:1 in the US. Blockbuster in the US supplies Blu-Ray disks exclusively in almost all of its stores, while other major US chains only stock Blu-ray disks exclusively. In Australia (and possibly New Zealand), Blockbuster and Video Ezy gave their nod to Blu-ray. All this due to the format not taking off. Of course, both formats are generally having troubles up against DVD.

All of this, of course, is causing more harm for both formats. But if anything, this hotly contested format war may just be coming to an end. All it needs now is for one of the two HD-DVD exclusive studios to jump ship, and then it is definately all down the tube. Let’s just hope that it is quick, although I feel sorry for all those people who bought HD-DVD players.

Then Sony can at long last claim victory, with it’s original video format war, the Betamax tape, the audio Minidisc, the Memory Stick, the UMD (Universal Media Disk) all going downhill (at least the Memory Stick is living happily with every other format though).