Blockbuster Poopoos On HD-DVD, Sides With Blu-Ray
New favorite website, The Consumerist, found an article stating that Blockbuster has chosen its weapon of choice in the ongoing DVD format war. Blu-Ray is that choice. Since late last year, Blockbuster has been testing both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray at 250 of its stores across the country. The result of that test was that Blu-Ray was chosen over 70% of the time.
Speaking to the Associated Press, Matthew Smith, senior vice president of merchandising, had this to say, "The consumers are sending us a message. I can't ignore what I'm seeing."
Hmmm, so what does the North American HD-DVD Promotional Group have to say? Ken Graffeo, co-president, responded with this:
"I think trying to make a format decision using such a short time period is really not measuring what the consumer is saying."
Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong. The thing is, Blockbuster has made up its mind. Unless there is some massive shift to HD-DVD in the near future (which is highly unlikely), I don't see this as being, in any way, good news for that format. Unless of course, there aren't a lot of people that rent from Blockbuster anymore, which I suspect there might be...but they are a dying breed. We'll just wait and see, but we already know that, at last check in, Blu-Ray was outselling HD-DVD two to one. Is this the end for HD-DVD? Weigh in with your thoughts.
AP: Blockbuster to Favor Blu-Ray HD Disc [AP]
[via The Consumerist]
Super Timsy
Posted to Movies-DVDs, Video Games on 18 June 2007
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: Blockbuster, Blu-Ray, Format War, HD-DVD
I'm pretty sure "the end" for one format or the other would be when Netflix discontinues it. If we didn't have Netflix, we'd probably be downloading movies off of Bittorrent rather than driving to a video store (we don't have Blockbuster here, Hollywood Video bought out all their local stores a few years ago.)
I guess it'd be nice if there were a Netflix-like service that had hardcore gay leather pr0n, but there isn't, so that's still in the realm of p2p for us.