And you thought I had forgotten all about the Warner Brothers announcement, tisk tisk. Seriously though I’ve received several emails asking why I hadn’t commented on the announcement and it simply boils down to waiting for the other shoe to drop, (read other studios following in kind) but it seems as if Paramount and Universal are holding steady (at least for now) so here it goes. Firstly this was a huge win for the BDA, no two ways about it; this was very likely the decisive factor in the format war.
I’ve said for quite some time now that Warner’s loyalty was worth its weight in gold, I still believe that but in the weeks since the announcement 
a couple of things have been gnawing at me. Someone else summed it up best at lunch a few days ago with the comment “if they (the hardware manufacturers) were just going to write the studios big checks for their support, why didn’t they just do that two years ago? I laughed but I wasn’t entirely dismissive to the idea either.
If you look back, Blu-ray won (yes I’m working on that assumption for the time being) the way they said they’d win, and HD DVD simply didn’t. The Blu-ray consortium always argued they had more clout, more support and well just more drive to make it happen. That’s not to say Toshiba didn’t put up a good fight, the format-fanatics might not be able to see it but HD DVD with just two exclusive studios (I’m averaging across the last two years) managed to put up some rather impressive numbers considering they were working with 900k or less players compared to Blu-ray’s 3.8 million.
This is an extended entry - Continue reading 'I, For One, Welcome Our New Insect Blue Overlords'...
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