… and I still don’t really care. Yesterday the rumor came up, that now also Paramount might be on the edge of switching from the HD-DVD into the Blu-ray camp thanks to some contract loophole. This basically makes Universal, as far as I can see, the only bigger studio left which supports HD-DVD.
Still, does this mean that Blu-ray will be a success? At least I don’t really see myself buying Blu-ray discs within this year simply because I don’t have an HDTV and DVDs simply do what I want right now while being a whole lot cheaper. For instance the “Bourne Ultimatum”, that’s supposed to hit stores in 2 days, costs on Amazon.de right now 14.95EUR on DVD and 27.95EUR on HD-DVD. Since I watch movies primarily through the DVD player on my MacBook on my 19" TFT-monitor the HD-DVD version (or Blu-ray if it were available) wouldn’t offer me anything that the DVD version couldn’t give me.
Some people also wrote, that this battle isn’t even all that relevant with digital distribution gaining more and more momentum. Well, perhaps for them. For me, not even digital distribution is for now not relevant when it comes movies, simply because it’s really hard for people outside of the USA to get content this way. The movie industry is about to make the same mistake as the record industry and stay with a region locked system (or a market segmentation with regional licensing agreements) on a market that’s supposed to have no borders anymore except for the language barrier.
Update: Seems like the rumor around Paramount was nothing but a rumor (at least for now)
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