Is the War Between HD-DVD and Blu-ray Over?

Earlier this week, Warner Bros. announced that they were going Blu-ray only, and dropping support for HD-DVD. Only Paramount and Universal are the studios left backing HD-DVD. Sony, Fox, Disney, Lionsgate and now Warner support Blu-ray. Interestingly, it may have been the Sony Playstation 3 that swung favor over in favor of Blu-ray, as each PS3 also functioned as a Blu-ray player. In 2007, the number of Blu-ray discs sold outnumbered HD-DVDs two to one. I also suspect that the stronger copy protection scheme for Blu-ray probably has something to do with the studios favoring the format.

Interestingly enough, the DIVX format lasted for about as long as the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray format war, and in that case, the reason for studios to join DIVX over DVD was also due to the stronger copy protection scheme offered by DIVX. Interestingly enough, the last holdouts for the DIVX format (Dreamworks, Fox and Paramount) are almost the same ones who are last holding out for HD-DVD (Dreamworks, Universal and Paramount). There's another similarity in this format war; DIVX was a consortium between Circuit City and various movie studios, while DVD was an open format. While in the hi-def case, both formats are closed, Sony's Blu-ray format was developed with studio interests in mind, while the HD-DVD format was mainly backed (at first) by hardware manufacturers. HD-DVD was able to create cheaper players, but not able to supply the movies.

I think the lesson to be learned here is that you can't make a successful media platform without media, and that studio support can be bought with large wheelbarrows full of money. There's probably a lesson in all of this here for those that want to make movies downloadable, as downloadable content is independent of media format.