Movie Studio Drops HD DVD Support Because of Forum Posters

I really doubt Fox was going to support HD DVD. I believe they were contacted about it though. I'm sure that was enough to lead to the idea that Fox was ready to switch, and that HD DVD was so close to winning the war (when in reality, they had no chance). And I still doubt money changed hands (excluding any strange contract issues). If it did, I think some of the Warner execs would like to see some of it.

Oh well, the war seems over, and hopefully the FUD from these HD DVD fansites will stop.

 

I don't know that much about them, nor do I really care. The article seems to just rehash info from other sources anyway, so it doesn't really matter. They cite Gizmodo, which isn't really a good idea (they're HD DVD fans IIRC...like several of these websites actually).

True, but how does that change the fact that HD DVD had little-to-no chance of winning the format war? Blu-ray has been dominating in just about every aspect of sales, and HD DVD wasn't going to be much more of an attractive format than it was in this last quarter (price gap closing, feature gap closing, major Paramount/DW movies already released, etc.).

I explained this in the other thread.

The format war was hurting overall profits for Warner (and the industry overall actually). Supporting Blu-ray exclusively would help end the war and potentially earn Warner more than any money that could be exchanged. Do you think they would have simply continued to support both formats had neither side offered them money (even if one side had say 95% market share)?

There is a financial reason for this move, but it wasn't necessarily because of any money being exchanged.

Of course, who can forget the floppy disk, CD, and DVD?

BTW, Betamax wasn't really superior to VHS (superior in some ways, but inferior in others).

 

Since you seemed to attribute Blu-ray as a proprietary technology by Sony, I thought you might as well include those other formats as proprietary technology from Sony (not technically correct, but who's worried about facts here?). I've always considered CD as a joint creation by Philips and Sony personally (Wikipedia seems to support that, although I'm sure there are better sources out there). IBM did invent the floppy disk IIRC, but I think Sony created the 3.5 inch format which was pretty popular IIRC (I certainly used a lot of them earlier in my life). DVD is certainly the one that had the least to do with Sony, but again, they were involved with it.

Betamax's biggest problem early on was recording time. If I'm not mistaken, the initial technology only allowed for 1 hour of recording time, compared to some VHS recorders that would allow for 4 hours. I think Sony tried to fix this, although it was either too late or not enough of difference to really matter.