http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=149

Blu-ray won

The sturm und drang over the Blu-ray vs HD DVD battle has come to naught. After a bit of jostling Blu-ray has taken an unassailable lead over HD DVD. Blockbuster’s Matthew Smith, SVP of merchandising, says “The consumers are sending us a message. I can’t ignore what I’m seeing.” This is what he’s seen:

Blockbuster has been renting both Blu-ray and HD DVD titles in 250 stores since late last year and found that consumers were choosing Blu-ray titles more than 70 percent of the time.

Ghost of Betamax laid to rest

Sony has played this game well. They own a movie studio, and got all but one of the major studios to release on Blu-ray. They put a Blu-ray player in every PS3. And they benefit by the rapid growth of HDTV sales.

Despite the disappointing sales of the PS3, the fact that it includes a Blu-ray player also tilted the playing field. A leading indicator: Toshiba recently reduced its US sales goal for HD DVD players by 40%. The rapid uptake of HDTV in the US completes the content-player-display triumvirate.

It is safe to buy that Blu-ray disk player now

The biggest loser in this is Toshiba. They’ve put a lot of time and money behind HD DVD. Microsoft is also a loser, partly as a supporter and partly because their add-on Xbox HD DVD player sales will tank. The folks who bought one can’t be feeling too good about Microsoft’s judgement.

Intel, another backer, loses too, but they seem to have had the least skin in the game. They probably just went along because of Microsoft.

The Storage Bits take

It is all over but the shouting. Expect to see some closeout sales on HD DVD players and burners, but I wouldn’t buy one. Now that the market has shifted you can expect to see Blu-ray burner prices drop faster. I expect that Apple will be adding on on their next gen Mac Pro, and after that, the MacBook Pro.

In time this may also boost Firewire, which is substantially faster than USB. In fact, USB 2.0 probably can’t handle 18x DVD writers at full speed, and 20x DVD writers are starting to make it to market. Once Blu-ray writers get up to 6x speed, Firewire will be the way to go.

The biggest winners though, are us, the consumers. 50 GB optical storage is good for all digital junkies. Now that we don’t have to worry about the format war, we can get back to rip, mix, burn!

Now excuse me while I go make a few HD-DVD pre-purchases I made on amazon.com a while back official purchases. Fracking piler-on! :rolleyes:

The reports of HD DVD's demise have been greatly exaggerated. If anything, it's still a few BD press releases shy of terminal.

Yeah, but you have to awknoledge.. that Blockbuster Thing was everywhere, even on the news here in Montreal... people now know. ZDnet is read buy many too..

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=149What the heck is that? Some old fogey's blog?

Tell us something we don't know ;).

With the Matrix, I'll stll hold on to my XA2.

hmmm...blogs are really annoying - especially since people easily think/use them as relevant sources.

I thought this was obvious to even Rain Man by now.

Tell us something we don't know ;).

With the Matrix, I'll stll hold on to my XA2.
Of course you will....



....because after all the link sharing, gloating and cigar puffing, there is still nothing actually better physically sitting on shelves for BR today then there was several weeks ago....

70% of nothing is still nothing.

So this is the third time now this year, that the death of HD DVD has been announced?

Sweet, I've never enjoyed a format so much that died repeatedly.

I suspect HD DVD will die again right after 300 is released, and probably before Christmas too.

The blockbuster news has been reported very widely all over the world. I'm sure many people got the image in their mind that the "format war" is over now. Often they also said in the same news that Blu-ray has been outselling HD DVD with a large margin for half an year so no wonder people start to think like the blog writer did. This is probably one of the most reported news about HD disc formats. It must have an impact on people when you first time read about a new disc format and how it is winning the competing format. It might actually be that the Blockbuster deal as such is not as important for Blu-ray as is the publicity it causes.

Btw, this is the first time our local news paper had any news about high def disc formats. And the news was that it seems Blu-ray is going to be the standard to replace DVD, based on the Blockbuster deal, studio support and Blu-ray disc sales.

Please don't start new threads when there are plenty of other ones that fit your topic. Thanks.