Warner Brothers Goes Exclusively Blu-ray for High-Def Releases
Time for another twist in the on-going saga of the Blu-ray vs HD-DVD high-definition format war. After a spending the past year and a half releasing movies on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, Warner Brothers have made a major decision this week to stick with only one format from this point on. The winner? Blu-ray.
According to the press release, they will continue to release new titles on HD-DVD until the end of May 2008, but the HD-DVD releases will not come day and date with their standard DVD and Blu-ray releases. Their reasoning for this decision seems to simply lie with the belief that the format war has gone on long enough, and that a winner must be chosen soon in order to win over consumers.
Kevin Tsujihara, President of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group had this to say: “A two-format landscape has led to consumer confusion and indifference toward high definition, which has kept the technology from reaching mass adoption and becoming the important revenue stream that it can be for the industry… Consumers have clearly chosen Blu-ray, and we believe that recognizing this preference is the right step in making this great home entertainment experience accessible to the widest possible audience.” Wow, they sound pretty sure that they’re aligned with the right camp, don’t they?
Interestingly, Toshiba have already responded to this major announcement, saying that they were blindsided by Warner and that it goes against HD-DVD contracts that they currently have in place. Either way, it sounds like it’s stirring up a fair bit of controversy, but will it lead to a clear victor in the high-def wars?
Comments (8)
‘Consumers have clearly chosen Blu-ray’
Yeah, right, where did that come from?
This format war is getting beyond a joke, the HD-DVD players go way down in price over the past few months with consumers only 2 be told the that one of the biggest studios with one the best back-catalogues is going Blu-Ray exclusive.
The combo players are looking more tempting now. Or just stick to up-scaled dvds.
Maybe Micheal Bay had a point..
Posted by Nemesis on January 4th, 2008Yeah just like when he said he had thought more about how to make a robot work than anybody else on the planet.
Posted by Henrik on January 4th, 2008Well in response to his comment about digital movie downloads he may have a point.
Warners maybe dropping blu-ray but the Xbox Live US Market has over 80 Warners Movies and growing, the Xbox Live UK Marketplace has just opened with Warners clearly dominating the titles. They even gave away 300 for only 100 points recently. Good timing, maybe.
Hopefully there will never be a day when Digital Downloads replace physical media..
Posted by Nemesis on January 5th, 2008Hopefully NOT! I don’t want a collection of arbitrary icons on a spinning disc. I want to get as tangible as possible, perhaps one day being able to afford actual prints of the films that I love.
Posted by Henrik on January 5th, 2008When my friends browse my dvd collection or whenever I showed them a good movie, they tend to look at the back covers reading the synopsis, see the credits and check out the artwork of that movie. That type of stuff should never be a luxury and I hope it never does.
Posted by Primal on January 5th, 2008Son of a bitch. time to buy a ps3
Posted by theman on January 5th, 2008Meh…I won’t be jumping on the Blu-Ray bandwagon anytime soon.
Posted by Baychuk on January 5th, 2008i would agree that reports that blu-ray is preferred by consumers is false. i think price is really the only thing, and the extra 20gb or so of space that blu-ray has to offer won’t win me over if i ever start to produce things needing that much space (assuming the current price differences remain).
Posted by z4ch on January 6th, 2008Leave a Reply