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).
