Blu-Ray Wins Format War

Well Blu-Ray has officially won the high definition disc format war over HD-DVD!

The writing was on the wall last month when Warner Bros announced that they’d only be supporting Blu-Ray after May 2008 (Sony paid a lot for this commitment from them), given that they sell between 20-30% of all DVDs, that’s a huge chunk of the market! That was followed by the literal silence from the HD-DVD camp at the recent electronics shows, so it’s now no real surprise to hear that HD-DVD is now officially discontinued.

HD-DVD was arguably the better format, or at least the one which provided the complete set of features from early on in it’s implementation, whereas Blu-Ray has been changed and developed along the way.

However, Sony always had a trump card in giving every PS3 owner a built-in Blu-Ray player whereas Microsoft only provided an additional external HD-DVD player option. At least you couldn’t argue with the pricing of that external player, it was very competitively priced and eventually had 5 HD-DVD movies given away with it to start your collection - that collection will now be limited to a cheap additions that you can pick as retailers try to shift their remaining HD-DVD stocks.

I’m glad that this war is now over and there is a ‘definitive’ high definition disc format winner, Sony might even start selling more PS3s just because it’s a cheap Blu-Ray player.

For everyone who has already invested in HD-DVD technology which now has a rather limited use, I very nearly bought a HD-DVD drive for my Xbox 360 a few months back, I’m now glad I didn’t obviously, but only because I don’t have the money to splash about like that - the quality of HD-DVD remains impressive!

Have any of you ‘taken part in the format war’? Which side did you pick and why? How do you feel about the state of play now?