Paramount has just elevated the high definition format war from idiotic to mind numbingly imbecilic. Their reasoning in their press release is nothing short of utter PR crap. As much as those people who always think that everyone has sold out annoy me, I have to come to no other conclusion than the fact that Paramount and DreamWorks sold their loyalty to the highest bidder. There’s simply no other reason for this. I recently (like a week ago) entered the high def format mix on the side of Blu-Ray. Frankly, I couldn’t care less who wins this moronic pissing contest between the formats, as long as SOMEBODY finally wins. As a tech nerd, both formats have a pro/con list which basically negate each other as far as I care. Ultimately, my loyalty to a format came down to sales numbers and studio support. Up until now, the studio support CLEARLY came down in favor of Blu-Ray, with Universal being the only major studio exclusively supporting HD-DVD. And frankly, I could envision Universal finally caving and supporting both at some point in the near future. They’re not utterly bound to the HD-DVD format backing hardware companies. Blu-Ray, on the other hand, has a few major exclusive studios, one of whom will utter their dying breath in exclusive support of the format - Sony Pictures (Columbia/Tri-Star/MGM/Etc). Being a format of their parent company makes them a format lock. And, quite frankly, my prime loyalty is 20th Century Fox, and they are a Blu-Ray exclusive. After this announcement, I decided to do a little investigating and came to realize that Paramount had been less than impressive on either format to date. When you look at the line-up of some of the other studios, Paramount’s not only looks weak but is also a bit lacking in good special feature contributions. The fascinating little tid-bit of this news is that the one exception to this new move is that Spielberg’s Paramount/DreamWorks movies will be excluded from format exclusivity. For those doubting the power of Spielberg in the industry, you need no more evidence than that. Now, will Paramount’s current Blu-Ray releases start going up in price as they surely stop production, or will retailers quickly start dumping them? Hopefully the latter, so I can get their handful of good releases nice and cheap.

So, thank you, Paramount, for dragging this format war right down into the thickest of the mud. You just changed the landscape of this battle, and *NOT* for the benefit of us customers (or the industry). I don’t care that you just chose the format I didn’t. In another year, combo players/drives that work with both formats will be dirt cheap and commonplace. I just don’t want this war to be continuing to rage on like it is today by that time. It should be over and done with by then. And it likely could have been until this turn of retarded events. We needed MORE studios supporting both formats, not one of the few that already was stop! I have to wonder, could the “high definition” market, in a broader sense than just these disc formats, have been a bigger mess of stupidity and half-committed offerings? Seriously, from high-def broadcasting to digital rights management (DRM) to this idiotic disc format war, the industry would have had to go out of their way to make things messier.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 8:05 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.