Don't even trip, Financial Times -- Paramount is sticking with HD-DVD

by Griffin McElroy on Jan 13th 2008 12:45PM

If you just bought an HD-DVD player attachment for your Xbox 360, don't feel completely discouraged about the recent movements in the home entertainment industry. While it definitely seems as though Blu-ray has soundly won the format war, Viacom Inc. owned Paramount Studios recently issued a statement saying they would continue producing HD-DVD movies.

The statement was a correction to a recent Financial Times article saying that the company was following in the footsteps of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., and adopting Blu-ray as their sole HD format. Following a brief plunge in the stocks of Toshiba (the company most invested in HD-DVD technology), Paramount issued a statement pledging their allegiance to the format less blue. Looks like it's time to hunker down for the long haul, people -- it might be a while before the clear victor for the Battle of the Formats is decided.

Source

Tags: blu-ray, bluray, format, HD, hd-dvd, hddvd, toshiba

Reader Comments (83)

Sit down, this may take a while....

No, it's more like: sit down, this may take more MONEY!

No. Joystiq just loves to twist any headline to try and get what they want. Sorry you bunch of 360 fanboys you had better go back and read that headline again. It says Paramount will continue to support HD-DVD. It doesn't say it will continue to support HD DVD EXCLUSIVELY. How about not making crap up next time. Paramount is going dual format for a short while before it changes and gives HD DVD the heave ho.

Do you really think Paramount's investors are going to sit back while sales of HD DVD players drop like dead flies? And how many times do you think the HD DVD group can keep tossing hundreds of millions of dollars at Paramount.

No, the format war is over and HD DVD is dead. It has just forgotten to lie down. Idiot headlines like these keep giving people false hopes.

@ morganfell

IF you're SO SURE that HD DVD is dead then why are you getting angry at Joystiq?

Seems like you're insecure what will all your bitching. If you're so confident that bluray will win then shut the f*ck up, sit back, and enjoy your incompletely developed HD format and let the war "go on".

I do NOT own either format but personally I'd rather that HD DVD won and I hope Toshiba can get another studio to consider moving back to the Red Camp.

Why does HD-DVD have anything to do with being an Xbox fanboy? I have a 360 and I just sold my HD-DVD drive. My 360 didn't change a bit, still plays the same games. I'll gladly buy a PS3 eventually when it has some games I want to play. To be honest, even on my 100 inch projection screen, HD-DVD movies are not that much of a difference. This whole war is over something no one even cares about.

It ticks me just because it is poor reporting. I am hoping that Sony will ban this site just like their Sports division told EGM to take a hike. The bias here is palpable. You can shovel it out the door like manure. I would hate to think the editors are oblivious because what does that say about thie perceptive abilities? You can't get a Sony article on here that has positive news that doesn't also arrive with a heaping helping of snideness. Stories that aren't Sony based still manage to be reported in such a way to that sheer innacurracy seems to be engineeered to get at Sony.

The only way this affects the format war is it could have been done now. Instead, this stupidity - who's end is now inevitable will drag out over the summer while HD DVD circles around looking for the right spot to die.

Using the word "war" to describe empty consumerism is somewhat unsettling.

That was not a slight on the part of the author of this blog, I'm just saying.

commy :P

The word 'war' itself is losing meaning when it is attached to all sorts of abstract things 'war on terror' 'war on drugs' 'format war' 'war on poverty'. Then we have the actual wars, which begin to lose meaning as more and more often a 'war' is something like Iraq, or Vietnam or Afghanistan... or a 'cold war' or an intelligence war. Bah... we're headed towards something similar to 'war is peace' imo.

thanks for posting a summary of your lit 101 term paper for the blog

At least Someone has balls... Go Paramount!

Or they are just waiting for another payoff!!!!

Regardless if Paramount stays red, it really doesn't make a difference. If Universal even so much as goes dual format it's over. It's the same reason that the PS3 is lagging so far behind the 360. If you only have a couple exclusive titles and then everything that the other guy has except delayed, what are consumers going to choose? The fact of the matter is, Paramount will stay with red until they don't want to or once it makes more financial sense to move to blu and then nobody will be supporting red.

Aged for truth!

LOL Zeus is that a joke? More HD-DVD players then BR players? Have you forgotten just like the HD-DVD camp that the PS3 is a BR player, and the best one also?

I'm not sure why that makes good business sense. Warner's "excuse" for boing blu (sans rumored $500 mil) actually made a lot of sense. I'm not sure why Paramount doesn't see the same thing, which is fairly obvious logic.
When consumers aren't avoiding the format war for fear of backing the losing format, everyone wins. The tech company who sells more, and the consumer, who doesn't have to worry about a format war.

I guess a quick end to the war was just a silly idealistic dream.

Its the fact that HD-DVD is cheaper to produce, and if they can, in any way, help the HD-DVD format win, that will mean cheaper production costs than with Blu-Ray.

I know I would fight for a cheaper but technically equal format to win.

Ugh...Zeus buddy.

Ok, I don't really consider myself a proponent of blu ray, more of a quiet enthusiast. I was relieved by Warner's statement simply because it meant an end to the "war." If Warner had gone HD DVD I'd have felt the same.
With that said, your HD DVD is cheaper argument makes sense only to fanboys. Otherwise it just doesn't hold water at this point.

Up until a few months ago, Paramount was backing BOTH formats. It wasn't until a handsome 150 million dollar payoff and 18 month exclusivity (timed exclusive) contract did Paramount even consider HD DVD by itself.

Production costs, licensing, etc. have nothing to do with it, otherwise everyone would have gone HD DVD. What MATTERS, zues, is SALES. Despite its higher costs, blu is inarguably selling better and has more support.

Negativecool, I like how you state you aren't a BD fanboy then ramble on with no counterbalance. You know for someone trying to play the calm middle ground you really suck at it.

You must have forgot about Sony buying off FOX for their BD support. So if you're going to talk about Paramount and their HD/BD money deal flipflop, you have to keep this factual tidbit in mind.

Why Blu-Ray is selling better and ultimately going to win the format war is twofold; movie studio support and the PS3. Having complete ownership of three major movie houses, a 20% stake in another and the pay off to FOX - Sony has installed their own support. While the Sony name and the PS3 brand fuels consumer opinion and perception - offering BD acceptance, cost and ease of use much the way the PS2 did for DVD.

HD DVD from the start was the underdog and for Sony's Blu-ray not to win this war after stacking the deck in their own favor is unimaginable.

I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure that there are more dedicated HD-DVD players in the consumer's homes than Blu-Ray players.

For the price and specifications, HD-DVD is the better choice, no matter how you look at it.

For christ sakes zeus, give it up with the tired go-to arguments.
The fact is Warner decided to go blu, and very well could have gone either way. I guarantee they had mounds of sales info to pour over before they made that critical decision. What they saw, told them blu ray was the way to go. There aren't too many idiots over at Warner.

The spokeslady's exact words are "Paramount's current plan is to continue to support the HD DVD format" which is just a nice way of saying "we're not commenting on how soon we'll be switching to blu"

M Knight says:"Wow, what a twist!"

Gotta love Robot Chicken :D

I think some of the reasons Blu-ray is winning are:

It has a cool name(spelling words wrong is cool now), also avoiding the old fashioned DVD name. Blu-ray sounds much more advanced than HD-DVD

The PS3 was a trojan horse for it.

Well thats about it, its not really superior to HD-DVD except capacity, but we all know price is the deciding factor... Maybe it's not this round...

Ooo, a statement! Yep, that'll last until they realize that no one is buying HD-DVD because four fifths of the movies people want are on Blu-ray.

Who knew Sony could pull it off?

I don't think HD-DVD can win at this point. However, I want them to keep on fighting. Why? Without competition, blu-ray players won't keep reaching lower prices. Moreover, all of the problems with the blu-ray format (e.g, why HD-DVD is better), such as a single format, all of the move-in-a-movie stuff... will go MUCH faster if they're comparing themselves to HDDVD.

Blu-ray's biggest competitor right now is DVD.

Bleh, there goes my plans to raid the hd-dvd firesale, build up a huge library of hd-dvds for $5 each, maybe get a second player for $99 or something... I was thinking a firesale wouldn't be so bad!!

Paramount said they'd "currently continue supporting HD DVD". This could still mean they'd stop their support for HD DVD in the future or they'd start supporting Blu-Ray soon. If Paramount was firm in their support for HD DVD, they wouldn't have left all those options open ...

Trust me, Paramount will go Blu.

ONE OF YOU DIE ALREADY! I was hoping that HDDVD would just die, therefore putting blu-ray as the winning format pushing PS3 further out so that it would have better success in sales, making more third-party developers want to pick up the ps3 for game design making the game community more diverse.

I don't know... I hope they drag this out as long as possible, because if they can, I'm sure Sony would give up. They've lost a shit ton of money on both Blu-Ray and the PS3.

Oh yeah, they'll give up alright...considering they have every studio backing up Blu-ray except for paramount and universal! r u retarded?

This doesn't mean anything. Paramount is going back to format neutral.

With Fox, Warner and Disney being Blu-only and Paramount going neutral (and seemingly Universal), it's over for HD-DVD.

Even though there will still be studios who support HD-DVD, all of the majors will be supporting BluRay. And few people are going to buy a player that only gets 60% of movies in HD when another gets virtually 100%.

So that means a virtual end to HD-DVD player sales and that means the BluRay software sales will greatly outstrip it (more than the current 2:1) and the return on making an HD-DVD release will cease to be attractive and thus studios that support HD-DVD will move to "deemphasize" their support of it.

It never said "HD DVD exclusive." Universal and Paramount will go dual format so they don't piss off the people who were duped into buying a dying format. Also the cost of manufacturing the discs is almost even.

http://wesleytech.com/blu-ray-vs-hd-dvd-replication-costs-analyzed-again/113/

I can't believe it's only 15 cents per disk more. The way the HD-DVD zealots made it sound I thought it was a few dollars more per disk.

Also the article is almost a year old so production costs must have gone down as blu-ray sales ramped up.

Almost even?

So, Spider Man 2 has sold 12.7 million copies.

There is a .$15 difference in the cost of each type of Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD.

That would be a $1.9 million dollar difference for ONE MOVIE.

If you imagine that as more people adopt the new technology, you will have movies selling 5 to 10 million copies. We will say that you may have 10 movies per year that over time sell 5 million.

5 million sold X $0.15 X 5 movies per year X 10 years of successful Blu-Ray sales. That is 37.5 million dollars in production costs over the life of the technology for just the top 5 movies. If you started adding in the costs of ALL the freaking Blu-Ray movies made over that ten year span. You are probably talking anywhwere between half a billion to 50 billion dollars (God only knows how many movies they would make around the world).

But is saving $0.15 per disc worth losing 20 GB? You almost double your capacity for about a ten percent cost increase. Isn't the fact that the per GB cost is better on Blu-Ray mean that Blu-Ray is cheaper?

I would say that Blu-Ray would still be better even when considering the costs of each.

You're using the 15 cents as a constant for a ten year estimate. Those 15 cents are from a year ago when BD was just taking off. Seeing as how BD sales have overtaken HDDVD sales by quite a bit worldwide the production costs of the format that is producing the most disks should be decreasing at a faster rate than the other. Might be even now, but who knows. I really doubt its still the same though.

Also since more disks are being sold for BD the overall profit is probably higher even with the slightly higher production costs of a year ago.

They didn't confirm their commitment to HD-DVD, they confirmed their negligence to consumers.

Did anyone read the article?

"'Paramount's current plan is to continue to support the HD DVD format,' Brenda Ciccone, a spokeswoman for Paramount, said in an e-mail today."

"Current" is the keyword and it's a major word in terms of marketing.

The use of the word "current" means that they are not willing to say anything right now.

Basically, they were issuing a wordier version of "No comment."

Call it what you want, just let it drag on... As long as Sony stays in LAST PLACE when it comes to games and consoles, then I really don't care. HD-DVD is the better format in so many ways but my #1 reason why is because it's not a Sony product.

Die Sony, Die.

Your Mario looks high and incoherent, as is your comment.

Die sony but live on MS?

You DO know there is NO lesser of 2 evils in this case right?

Both are huge conglomerates and both could give less than 2 cares about the consumer as far as them spending money on their products.

Sony isnt going anywhere and neither is MS. Being in last place for generations didnt stop nintendo and coming in 2nd/3rd or whatever this time isnt going to stop Microsoft OR sony.

Mind sharing some of those "ways" that HD-DVD is superior to Blu-Ray? I'm still laughing..

Wow you are one ignorant fucker...

I think that Toshiba will use their last major ammunition to gain mommentum or at least slow Blu-ray's victory. Toshiba has recently slashed the prices of it's players to mass market levels. Link: http://www.dailytech.com/Toshiba+Launches+HD+DVD+Player+Fire+Sale/article10318.htm
Everywhere from CC, BB, & Amazon has the A3 for less than $150 and A30 for around $180 w/ 7 free movies. At that price you get an HD player that also is one of the best upconversion player for SD discs for the price of a regular upconverting DVD player. They have also slashed their disc prices as they now range from $14-$24 in prices. With this move Toshiba in my opinion may have at least delayed Blu ray's destiny of monopolizing the HD market!!!

Toshiba doesn't sell discs, they can't cut the retail price on them.

They did cut the price on their HD-DVD players, but they also didn't announce a new generation of them at CES as was expected.

This looks like an exit strategy to me.

Please....Warner Brothers stated "devout support" for HD-DVD before the Holidays, only to drop it like a stone come January....lesson: Movie Studio's lie as much as politicians.

and no this slash is not a liquidation sale. The recent $98 one day sale was a showcase on how much cheaper Toshiba and M$ could produce these players. IF and ONLY IF HD DVD continues to sell well using this tactic(which would be difficult for Blu ray to follow) they might sway the industry to their direction. I expect Toshi to follow this move(which they forshadowed when they did the sub $100 sale) with pushing the HD combo format to consumers. With 5 months left till WB moves Blu, Toshi can maybe convince them to at least stay neutral. I've also seen $700 toshi HD-DVD lap tops and $500 Acer HD-DVD desktops on sale where they used to be $1000 and $650 respectively!!!

What is this crap that people keep spouting about MS making HD-DVD players and dictating what Toshiba does with it. It's Toshiba that rules HD-DVD. The only thing MS cares about is the interface because they designed HDi. At the rate Blu-ray keeps changing their profiles, who knows HDi might find it's way into Profile 4 or 5. MS has already said that although they have no plans to do it yet, if HD-DVD loses, they'll make an add-on for the 360.

I like blue but I love everything about red. Next Paycheck ill be buying 1 Paramount HD-DVD for this move as I want the format to stick around.

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Don't even trip, Financial Times -- Paramount is sticking with HD-DVD

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