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NPD Group Says "Wait! HD-DVD Isn't Dead Yet"
The NPD group, owners of the not-quite-as-popular-as-they-had-hoped HD-DVD format, attempted to battle back against the tide of "naysayers" who claim that the format war is over and have declared Blu-Ray Disc the winner. "While select articles have implied that HD-DVD as a format is doomed and the sky is falling for the format's supporters, the NPD Group this afternoon reinforced that sales results from a single week do not necessarily indicate a trend, and that the week in question had several intriguing variables that have gone unreported."
How does it help you that HD-DVD has less DRM? What do you get out of that? Something tells me that you are precisely the reason blu-ray is winning. There really is very little reason to backup these discs until hard drive capacity is much larger. The discs are very durable and they are very large, so backup is far less likely to be your reason. Preventing piracy is a very good thing. Blu-ray has features letting you share content with other devices, etc. Pretty realistic and consumer friendly, while fucking pirates in the ass (like Sony did to lik-sang).
Now MS is not involved in HD-DVD, but has been paying tens of millions to harm blu-ray. Why? because they want both standards to fail, and realize HD-DVD lost ages ago. It's exploiting it's monopoly to interfere in an unrelated market. It's not uninformed to resist that. It would be idiotic to buy an HD-DVD player at this point.
Also, you criticize Sony for selling blu-ray players in PS3s. For selling their own product. What the hell is wrong with you? This is utterly benign conduct.
Anyway, Sony is a pretty fair competitor. They've ruled video games, pretty much still do in terms of revenue, and Nintendo and MS are thriving anyway. They have been perfectly friendly working with Toshiba and Samsung, their major competitors. They aren't zealous, they respond to poor sales by creating better products. Microsoft dominated Browsers and destoryed netscape, dominated office aps and destroyed many competitiors, same for operating systems. They force sales on customers in a way Sony just doesn't. Obviously there is no comparison.
Do you want Microsoft to dominate your living room, for the xbox to be the only viable platform for games, for MS's movie downloads to succeed? We all know this would be very bad for consumers, resulting in lower quality and higher prices and horrible DRM (bad DRM = less usable, not less pirate-able). MS is a real threat, and blu-ray and the PS3 is the only real competitor.
That's why MS is pouring so much money into this format war. You see the fact that MS isn't really invested in HD-DVD, and think that is a plus for them? It's a huge minus.
oh, and one last point: blu-ray is better. It sounds better, it holds more data, has more movies, and it moves away from the dvd forum monopoly and such shifts are generally healthy. Lack of region coding really is the only legitimate gripe I know of, and it's not a big deal for me or 99.99999999999999999999999999% of the world.