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There was evidence of HD-DVD’s decline at this point already, though; an imminent PlayStation 3 price cut was rumored for April of that year, which deterred potential XBox 360 customers (the actual price cut for the PS3 didn’t come about until July). The aforementioned broadening of support from Paramount and Warner Bros. (which owned the single largest library of titles) to Blu-ray lessened the sense of risk from more people who were on the fence. Paramount’s decision to move back to exclusive HD-DVD support in August was likely something of a neutered victory; at that point, the PS3 price cut did actually happen, and Paramount’s move (the second between the formats in six months) established that studio support for one format or another was fairly fluid, with the exception of Sony.

The key player in 2007 was Warner Bros.; as mentioned, they possessed the largest film library for any one studio. In addition, they had hedged their bets by supporting both formats at the beginning of the year. To illustrate this, they implemented a strategy in January, hopefully to be picked up by other studios, known as Total HD: a release that contained both Blu-ray and HD-DVD versions of the film in one package. At roughly the same time, LG Electronics released a player that read both HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs. There were rumors of Sony and Panasonic making a similar hybrid, but these never progressed beyond the initial stages.

Warner was perhaps the only studio big enough to get away with this kind of fence-sitting, as the HD format war had gotten fairly aggressive by this point; Blockbuster Video had announced it was dropping support for HD-DVD, under rumors that the Blu-ray Disc Association had paid them off to do so; similar rumors flew in regard to Paramount moving back to HD-DVD exclusivity. Blu-ray initiated a buy-one-get-one-free promotion in October of 2007; Toshiba countered by announcing and then releasing an HD-DVD player for $98 on Black Friday. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), no other studios signed on for the Total HD initiative, and Warner put it on ice in November of 2007. Meanwhile, the price cut for the Toshiba HD-DVD player, while effective in the short term, answered no questions as far as the format’s longer-term viability. No studios switched allegiance to HD-DVD as a result of the sale, and no retailers changed their mind about advertising it.


The Winner*

Roughly one month after the Toshiba HD-DVD player went on sale, and shortly after Warner “suspended” the Total HD initiative, the studio made a decision that turned out to have major ramifications. Their biggest domestic grosser of 2007, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was released for home purchase and rental. Warner released two separate versions of the movie, one for each format. Here, though, the assets were different between the two: the HD-DVD version of the film possessed Warner’s “In-Movie Experience”, which consisted of roughly an hour of HD vignettes. Other than this, though, the remaining features on the HD-DVD version were in SD. The Blu-ray version of the movie got these features in HD, plus an additional 44-minute documentary in HD, at a slight price premium.

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