Last week, Paramount and DreamWorks joined Universal in exclusive support of HD DVD, battling Sony's Blu-ray for space in your home theater setup. With three major studios now in each camp — Disney and Fox also support Blu-ray, while Warner releases films on both formats — the war shows no signs of ending, certainly not before the holidays.
"It really splits things down the middle," says Peter Bracke of High Def Digest (highdefdigest.com). Where Blu-ray had seemed to be pulling ahead, now "it's back to a stalemate."
In coming months, studios will attempt to woo buyers with waves of new movies for each format, including Spider-Man 3 (Blu-ray) and Transformers (HD DVD).
"There will be titles that will have some ripple but nothing that's going to amount to a tipping point," says Phil Swann of TVPredictions.com.
A major weapon could be the price of the players. HD DVD now holds the upper hand with a $179 add-on for Microsoft's Xbox 360 game system and Toshiba players for less than $300. Samsung and Sony sell Blu-ray players for less than $450; the Blu-ray-based PlayStation 3 starts at $499.
Swann sees the possibility of "a $99 HD DVD player this season in discount stores." And he says "the Blu-ray camp has to meet them, not necessarily dollar for dollar, but they have to get pretty close."
LG sells a player that handles both formats, and Samsung plans one by year's end, but both go for about $1,000. (All players handle standard DVDs; some play CDs.) Swann calls the dual-format players "dead on arrival" because "no one wants to spend $1,000 on a DVD player." But with recent announcements, "the concept obviously makes more sense today."
Blu-ray movies have outsold HD DVD 2-to-1 so far this year. Blockbuster has announced plans to offer Blu-ray exclusively for rental in most stores, and Target said it planned to sell a Sony Blu-ray player only. "The momentum was clearly with Blu-ray," says Chris Roden, analyst with research firm Parks Associates.
HD DVD's supporters expect that retailers may reassess their allegiances as player sales increase. "The same way I changed my mind, watch how many other people change theirs, starting with Blockbuster," DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said last week in announcing the studios' shift.
Katzenberg said he had been skeptical about releasing films such as Shrek on high-definition discs because high prices of players precluded many families from adopting either format. Now, he expects sub-$200 HD DVD players by the holiday season. "If the consumer sees a value and wants it, retail is going to find a way to put it front and center for them," he said.
But the reality is, both sides need to get the word out, because consumer surveys done by Parks and the NPD Group suggest that most consumers aren't aware of either type of disc, "much less that there are two formats," NPD's Ross Rubin says.
"Consumers don't think about releases in terms of which studios release them, they think about stars or franchises like Harry Potter or the Pixar movies," he says. "As long as there remains uncertainty about which format which titles are going to appear in, there's going to be a significant barrier to adopting either format."
Source: USA Today, 8/27/07
