James Delahunty
9 Oct 2005 14:58
Warner Brothers is set to raise the stakes yet again in the DVD format battle by deciding to now throw support behind Sony's Blu-Ray Disc format instead of Toshiba's HD-DVD. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are two formats that are battling it out to become the next standard after DVD as the demand is growing for high definition material, which requires much more capacity than DVD provides. The DVD format is worth $18bn annually in sales in the United States.
Adding support from Warner Brothers, a division of Time Warner, to the Blu-Ray backers list would be a crucial vote of confidence for Blu-Ray which already touts support from Disney and Fox. Back in November 2004, Warner, Paramount, Universal and New Line Cinema pledged support to HD-DVD. Now Warner seems set to declare "non-exclusive" support for the Blu-Ray format, meaning it will probably produce films in both formats.
However the support for Blu-Ray could mean that sometime in the future Warner will drop Toshiba's HD-DVD and release only in the Blu-Ray format. Paramount has already announced that it will release movies in both formats. HD-DVD also got a huge boost with support from Intel and Microsoft. Intel however, stated it would also put support behind Blu-Ray if it had more consumer friendly features like HD-DVD.
The next generation standard, whatever it will turn out to be is incredibly vital to Hollywood. Movie studios are witnessing drops in DVD sales lately as most consumers now own DVD players and some of the favorite movies. So Hollywood needs a format to support HD versions of the movies that can hold way more extra features to sell their movies yet again in another format.
Source:
MSNBC
Thanks to chickenR for the News Submission