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

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.'"

Comments

Betamax wasn't better.

[RightSaidFred99]

VHS had longer recording times, and that is what the customers wanted. This is proved by the fact that VHS "won", and ergo VHS was "better". Betamax did have better video quality, but it was not "better" in every dimension.

Even for /., bad summary and headline

[DragonWriter]

The article does not say that Sony paid Warner $400 million. It merely states that there was a bidding war between Sony and Toshiba and that unnamed "analysts" have suggested that payout may have been "as much as $400 million", though no one who knows anything is saying anything. Actually, the summary could have been good with a small change:

Is $400 million too much? Sony didn't think so and this article speculates that's how they won the Hi-Def format war.

Should read:

Is $400 million too much? This article speculates that Sony may not have thought so and goes on to speculate that's how they won the Hi-Def format war.

Really, other than the really obvious things we all know (Sony won the format war), there aren't any facts in the article, just speculation and some rather weird ideas from a variety of sources. Like Professor Xavier Dreze and his suggestion that "PlayStation buyers ... unwittingly embraced Blu-ray and undermined HD DVD." As if PS3 buyers were shelling out the high price of the console without realizing that it was a Blu-ray player, and just started purchasing Blu-ray discs without any consciousness of their actions. To the extent that PS3 owners embraced Blu-ray at all, they didn't do it "unwittingly".

Re:Market Isn't Even Ready

[morari]

I wish we could stop hearing about streaming video. I like having my content conveniently on actual media that I can access instantly whenever I want without having to go through or ask anyone else. Most of the world doesn't even have broadband at all, which I think is a far more important problem than people not being able to download and redownload gigantic movie files because they've never heard of a disc binder.