This article was written on August 21, 2007 by CyberNet.
HD DVD fans are cheering while Blu-Ray fans are booing. The reason? Paramount and DreamWorks have decided that for the next 18-months, they’ll exclusively be releasing movies on the HD DVD format. Paramount has released at least 30 movies so far on both formats which makes sense, but they say that this change and exclusive commitment with HD DVD which includes Paramount pictures, DreamWorks, Nickelodeon, and more, was the result of “extensive evaluation of current market offerings.”
What this means is that the hugely successful movies like Transformers and Shrek 3 which are due for release in the coming months will only be available on HD DVD. Blu-Ray fans aren’t the only ones upset about this, Michael Bay is furious. He’s the director of Transformers, and on his site he says “I want people to see my movies in the best formats possible. For them to deny people who have Blu-Ray Sucks! They were progressive by having two formats. No Transformers 2 for me.”
Now we know that there really isn’t a clear winner, at least not yet. While Blu Ray has been out-selling HD DVD, the latter ends up being more affordable for the consumers. Not only that, HD DVD’s are cheaper to manufacture. While plain old DVD’s work for me, I know there are many of you who are just ready for this battle to end, so you know who the “winner” is. And then you can go about buying movies in one format… enough of the competition already!
So now I’m wondering whether Michael Bay’s threat to ditch Transformers 2 will be enough to sway Paramount back to offering both formats, or if they’ll end up sticking to their guns and potentially lose out on the millions that Transformers 2 could bring in. What are your thoughts on this?
Source (Thanks for the tips Max, Mohan, and Phillip)
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Do you still look back in the past with fond memories of when HD DVD and Blu-ray duked it out? I wonder how much of a role did the Sony PS3 play in championing the cause of Blu-ray, but eventually, Blu-ray was no Betamax successor, and HD DVD basically went the way of the dodo not too long after its debut. Having said that, the Blu-ray Disc Association has shared in the past that they are working on a 4K-friendly disc format eventually, but the folks over at Singulus do seem to be impatient as they are not going to wait before making some announcements of their own. Singulus of Germany has apparently just completed production tests of a Blu-ray disc which has been touted to carry a whopping 100GB of storage space into three layers. This has led it to be described as being “ideal” for 4K movies.
