The Sydney Morning Herald has a very interesting article on their website at the moment about the blu-ray / hd-dvd battle…
While they are saying that there is nothing in the race at the moment and both are tied they do seem to be leaning over to the hd-dvd side with some of their comments.
Some of the interesting things that I found out today, Wal-Mart itself accounts for 45% of all DVD sales in the entire US…. they sell DVD’s at a loss to entice people into the stores. Not the most original idea but it’s obviously working well for them.
Oh the other rumour is that Wal-Mart are planning to sell el-cheapo hd-dvd players at the end of the year. If they start to use hd-dvd’s as they have dvd’s then that could be a killer blow against Blu-Ray…
The majority of foreign language European studios are also supporting hd-dvd, when you put that into the perspective of 40% of all dvd’s sold in France last year where independant EU studio movies it looks like a bit of a coup for hd-dvd.
Like I said in the begining they seem to be leaning towards hd-dvd, as I am sure the blu-ray backers could give me stats to push the other way as well.
Link to Blu-ray versus HD DVD – Home Theatre – AtHome – Technology – smh.com.au
Last Updated: May 28, 2007
James
May 28, 2007 at 12:27
I’m not sold on either. The biggest competitor to the next-gen formats is DVD itself. After a while DVD sales started to slow, mostly because a lot of people finally got the movies they wanted to own. So now it’s more of a basic consumption of new releases. The industry seems to have misunderstood this and has convinced itself that a new format would bring those glory days back. But it won’t. The car replaced the horse to a definitive degree, because the car made many improvements over the horse. DVD was a marvel over VHS and simply granting higher resolutions won’t inspire nearly the same revolution.
There’s also the matter of studios not even using DVD properly. How often do we get releases that fit two or three hours of video on a DVD? A good example is with TV shows, where often only four episodes are put on a DVD. I don’t believe that the studios will come even close to using all of Blu-Ray of HD-DVD’s capacity.
Tim
May 28, 2007 at 13:36
The Walmart/cheap HD DVD player story was fake. Do a search on the net for more info.
LazySAGamer
May 28, 2007 at 14:35
Yeah I have seen the retractions but I have also seen Microsoft denying the Elites existence and Sony denying that they are releasing an 80Gb PS3 🙂