Intermittent Issues:
HD and the Format Wars (2002-2005) Part 2

By Ben Gruchow

July 27, 2015

This battle is not as close as you might think.

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The Blu-ray version of Order of the Phoenix outsold the HD-DVD version by a considerable margin, the HD features evidently being a bigger draw for consumers than the In-Movie Experience. Shortly after, in January of 2008, Warner Bros. announced that they would be supporting Blu-ray exclusively. With this, the deal was all but done. The only studio exclusively backing HD-DVD was Universal, and the format now only had the additional support of Paramount and DreamWorks.

Potential reasons for this defection by Warner Bros. to Blu-ray exclusivity varied, although one common factoid involves a payout to Warner from the Blu-ray Disc Association of between $400 and $500 million. The most detailed “dirty” reason for the defection came from Gizmodo, which indicated that Warner originally intended to go HD-DVD exclusive, but saw increasing hardware and movie sales for Blu-ray as a potential liability. As a result, they advised Toshiba that, if another studio came on board as HD-DVD exclusive, Warner would drop its support for Blu-ray.

HD-DVD did receive a notice of intent from another studio, 20th Century Fox, claiming that they would also make the switch. Fox, however, backed out of the deal at the last second (shades of another payout from the Blu-ray Disc Association were indicated here, to the decidedly smaller sum of $120 million); without another studio willing to make the switch, Warner dropped the format and went Blu-ray exclusive, receiving a payout as they did so.




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The reason why this happened was ultimately irrelevant; Warner’s switch precipitated the bottom falling out from underneath HD-DVD. Toshiba slashed prices for players again, but it had little impact on ownership and no impact on studio affiliation. New Line Cinema, then in the middle of being absorbed into Warner Bros., defected from the format after releasing a single film on HD-DVD, Pan’s Labyrinth. Netflix, which had up to that point been supporting both formats, went Blu-ray exclusive. In February of 2008, Best Buy went Blu-ray. Target stores had already gone with Blu-ray. Finally, Walmart went Blu-ray exclusive on February 15th; four days later, Toshiba announced the end of development or support for HD-DVD. The final studio film to be released in the format was Twister - the first film to be released on DVD. Blu-ray won the HD format war, a little over three years after it first took shape.


*Except for This Part

There’s a saying: “A hundred percent of zero is still zero.” I’m honestly not sure where I heard it, and it seems a little harsh to use that here. I like this version of the saying better: “The best of the Twilight movies is still a Twilight movie.”

When DVD took off, it really took off. The comparisons between VHS and DVD in home entertainment, and the clear advantage that DVD had in just about every way except for initial cost of ownership, were visible to the most disinterested layman. I remember walking through a Best Buy in 1997 and seeing a massive demo unit for DVD set up. A clip from the first tornado sequence in Twister was being used, and the effect on the consumer was noticeable: People walking by stopped and stared, almost as a matter of habit. The widescreen image, the clarity, and especially the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio—as an experience, it was head and shoulders above not only the version of Twister that had been available on VHS for six months by that point, but above virtually anything else outside of an actual movie theater. I bring up this anecdote to strike a contrast between SD home theater and HD home theater, and the visible differences between the two, and the very different rate of adoption for SD-to-HD versus analog-to-digital.


Continued:       1       2       3       4       5       6       7

     


 
 

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