HD DVD is dead. Blu-ray wins. It's all over.

By James Rivington

January 14th 2008 | Tell us what you think [ 0 comments ]

It's now probably safe enough to buy a Blu-ray player without worrying about BD losing the format war

It's true, CES 2008 was a largely forgettable affair. The odd groundbreaking concept TV was mixed in with a lot of old tat. And now that it's all done and dusted, all most people seem to want to talk about is that weird prank where a particularly bored Gizmodo blogger decided to use a secret remote control to turn off all the TVs in the CES showrooms.

That about says it all. But one profound thing that did actually happen was that the HD DVD disc format was marched in front of a firing squad by Warner Bros and was then viciously shot in the face by hundreds of bloodthirsty American journalists.

HD DVD as a format is now in some serious bother. The chances of a recovery seem extremely slim. Blu-ray looks like it's set to become the de facto HD disc format. A 50GB disc will be the last mainstream optical disc format before solid state takes over.
Blu-ray victorious?

When the press conferences were going on inside the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas last Sunday and Monday, all everyone was talking about was Warner's decision to drop HD DVD, and Toshiba's decision to cancel the HD DVD press conference.

It was exactly what CES needed to get people at the show excited. The LA Times immediately declared that the format war was over. And that seemed that.

The most amazing thing in all this, of course, is that the Blu-ray Disc Association was the only group of people at CES who weren't declaring a Blu-ray victory. I turned up to the BDA's press conference on the Monday afternoon expecting victory crows and a firework display of bloated acceptance speeches from the BDA representatives there.

But this failed to materialise. The press conference consisted of BDA reps from the likes of Warner, Fox and Lions Gate, giving updates on sales figures. And that was it. I was shocked that even the BDA's chief in the US, Andy Parsons, didn't make any kind of gloating statement.
Fanboy journalists

As it turned out though, he didn't need to. At the end of the conference, about 10 questions were invited from the floor. About four of the questions came from supposed US journalists who decided that they were incredibly stoked about the demise of HD DVD and would waste the questions by making silly jokes.

"Would you ever consider giving people a discount on BD players if people came and traded in their defunct HD DVD players," one particularly annoying American hack said with an enormous self-serving smile on his face. The entire floor began to shake as a room full of fat people howled in hysterical laughter.

More stupid jokes and questions followed; all were completely pointless. Even the serious ones were non-questions coming from people who didn't know what they were talking about. The only thing they didn't do was to start a Mexican wave and start chanting: "Blu-ray, Blu-ray, Blu-ray..."

And so it seems that there were as many Blu-ray fanboys in the room as there were sitting at home reading about it. Parsons didn't need to do his own PR. He knew there were enough suckers in the press conference to do it for him.

And this is precisely the reason why HD DVD has no chance. It's doomed. But it won't be Blu-ray or its Association that kills it off. It'll be the press who will write stories exactly like this one.

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Have you already bought an HD DVD player? If so, what are you going to do with it? Or did you plump for Blu-ray?

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