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Sony Paid Warner Bros. $400 Million to Go Blu-Ray?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the beats-having-to-say-hd-dvd-all-the-time dept.

eldavojohn writes "How much would you pay to be the leading video media technology right now? Is $400 million too much? Sony didn't think so and this article speculates that's how they won the Hi-Def format war. 'With billions of dollars in global sales at stake, experts had predicted the Toshiba-Sony battle would go on for years - not unlike the 1980s battle of videotape formats between VHS (Matsushita) and Betamax (Sony). That war lasted a decade, leaving Sony battered and humiliated. So how did this epic battle come to such an abrupt end? The answer lies in part with the bruising Sony experienced with Betamax, which, like Blu-ray, was also the better product on paper.'"

8 of 487 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah right. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Next they'll be saying Sony would put rootkits on CDs or something...

    1. Re:Yeah right. by kerohazel · · Score: 3, Funny

      Of course not. They'll put UNCRACKABLE rootkits on Blu-ray, and encode it with a 16-byte number that no one will ever figure out.

      --
      Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
  2. Re:First by esocid · · Score: 3, Funny

    First to sell my HD-DVD, listed as Blu-Ray, on ebay.

    --
    Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
  3. $ony? by krazycraft · · Score: 5, Funny

    So we should starting calling them $ony?

    1. Re:$ony? by bdcrazy · · Score: 5, Funny

      $on¥

      --
      Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
  4. Re:Betamax wasn't better. by flimflam · · Score: 3, Funny

    The odd thing is, most of the *cough* porn I've seen in high-def has had the HD-DVD label at the top, not Blu-ray.

    And here's me thinking the porn industry was going to decide this battle. What's *cough* porn? Some sort of wierd fetish I don't know about?

    --
    -- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
  5. Re:free market? by mweather · · Score: 3, Funny

    My pot dealer says othwerwise.

  6. Ban corporate gay marriage! by fugue · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm sick of same-sex corporations mating with each other. It's wrong, it's paganism, it's not what we believe in!

    Hmmm. From now on, no more corporations telling each other to "bend over"?

    Dunno.

    --
    "The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."