Paramount to Drop Blu-Ray for HD-DVD

JM78 writes to tell us The New York Times is reporting that Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation will be dropping support for Blu-ray Disc and going solely with HD-DVD for their next gen DVDs. "Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, said consumers seeking to switch to high-definition DVDs will be enticed by the movies available for HD-DVD players. He added the lower price for the Toshiba devices will appeal to the family market. 'It's a game-changer, what they're doing, and it's why we decided to throw in with them,' Katzenberg said."

Comments

Money Talks

[JackSpratts]

Blogger "Swanni" says the HD-DVD folks coughed up 100 mil to help Paramount reach the decision.

- js.

http://www.tvpredictions.com/bluraypay082007.htm

Re:Yeah, right.

[Technician]

I smell someone making an argument to get a better deal.

Doubly suspicious since the family friendly Blockbuster Rental stores simply will be stocking mostly Blu-Ray.

"Paramount's move comes weeks after Blockbuster, the DVD rental chain, said it would stock more Blu-ray discs to cope with rising consumer demand."

From the article here;
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e8569e16-4f61-11dc-b485- 0000779fd2ac,dwp_uuid=e8477cc4-c820-11db-b0dc-000b 5df10621.html

Re:Does anyone even care at this point?

[king-manic]

I've noticed at all the rip you off outlets (Visions) HD-DVD movies tend to be more expensive then blurays ones for exactly the same movies. I wonder why? 300 was $29.95 cnd for blue ray but $39.95 for HD-DVD at visions electronics.

This is big as Paramount is the biggest studio

[llZENll]

Paramount is the biggest studio of 2007 with 18% market share.

January 1-August 19, 2007
Overall Gross: $6.585 billion
Rank Distributor Market
Share Total
Gross* Movies
Tracked 2007
Movies**
1 Paramount 18.1% $1,189.5 15 11
2 Warner Bros. 14.8% $974.8 23 13
3 Buena Vista 14.1% $930.6 16 8
4 Sony / Columbia 14.0% $924.6 19 16
5 Universal 11.3% $745.0 13 11
6 20th Century Fox 10.9% $719.9 17 9

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/studio/

Re:The End of this Format War?

[Fallen Kell]

Links to top A/V sites:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p= 11351599
http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=273
htt p://www.guidetohometheater.com/hddiscplayers/1206p s3blu/index3.html
http://www.insert25.com/playsta tion-3/ps3-better-console-or-blu-ray-player/
http ://www.soundandvisionmag.com/hd-dvd-bluray/1927/sh ootout-3-blu-ray-disc-players-page9.html

I could go on, but I don't need to. It says more that http://hdtvmagazine.com/ uses the PS3 as their "reference" player for BluRay. So does the fact that http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/ used it as well.

Not Nintendo

[McFadden]

They aren't selling below cost to kill a competitor, it's just that they've chosen to lose money on the consoles in order to make money selling games. That's nothing more than Sony and Nintendo have been doing for years.

I'm amazed the debate has managed to last this long without someone pointing out that Nintendo don't do this, and as far as I know, never have with their consoles. The 'profit on every console sold' manta is one of the fundamental pillars of their business. I thought pretty much everyone knew that one.

Re:Yeah, right.

[WARM3CH]

LPCM support is mandatory for both standards. However, you maybe surprised to know that Dolby TrueHD, which is a lossless compression method, is mandatory for HD-DVD and is only optional for Blue-ray. As a result, most of the HD-DVD titles come with the audio compressed with TrueHD and no LPCM (selecting only one of the mandatory options), saving between 2:1 to 4:1 on storage space while blue-ray titles, should always carry the LPCM soundtrack and in practice rarely include a TrueHD track. Carrying only LPCM means that all other nice features of TureHD is going to be missed: dialog normalization, Dynamic range compression, downmixing to any arbitrary number of channels, etc...