Media Wonk

Paramount just took a $150M short-term payoff at the expense of the high-def future for the rest of the studios and the consumer. Nice job, Paramount.

It's all about the money baby! Follow the money trail! So! What's Blockbuster and Target going to do now?

Paul, please proof and spellcheck your articles.

The reasons Kelly Avery gave for supporting HD-DVD exclusively are going to have the opposite effect. You jumpstart the sale of movies by getting to one format. The only way a larger volume of consumers will adopt a high definition format is if there is only one. Paramount's move just made that even more difficult for the consumer and will prolong this war unneccessarily. Her answer is complete BS. They jumped ship for the money plain and simple. $150 million for 18 months of so called exclusivity(Speilberg isn't exclusive)probably sounded great to Paramount. Blu-ray will dominate HD-DVD this holiday season like it has for all of 2007 but it probably won't ring the deathknell like it should have thanks to Paramount. Too bad.

I have a hard time understanding how moving AGAINST the momentum of the format war will help to shorten it. It's counter-intuitive. Realistically, the studio making the most money on HD at this point is Warner Bros and they're a dual format supporting studio - the same as Paramount and Dreamworks were until yesterday. It's obvious why Sony pictures (the owners if the highest grossing film of the year-to-date, Spider-Man 3) will never support HD DVD, but the only logic that allows Paramount to support HD DVD exclusively (and Universal, for that matter) at this point is a pay off.

IAs someone who been watching this from the sidelines all this did is convince me not to get involved at all. We now seem to have a SACD vs DVD-A situation with HD video media. I was hoping to purchase something once the new gen players were out but now believe that the winning format is going to be DVD. I don't think either format has a chance to go mainstream while this nonsense is going on.

As a supporter of both formats, I am happy to see action which increases the likelihood of survival for either. No matter how you cut it, HD-DVD disks continue to be less expensive than BD disks, so I think the general public needs the lower-cost alternative. Finally, I strongly believe the only solution to this mess is for ALL players to be dual-format. My next player will only be dual-format. Too, bad Toshiba and Sony - I think you're both going to have to go dual or lose sales.

Nice of you to show how short-sighted and/or naive you are, Mr Sweeting.

Paul, I know Paramount lost my DVD sales. I no longer support a Studio that goes from a neutral stance to be exclusive. I was planning on buying the Blu-Ray releases.

Paul, how can you find any logic in a company that goes against a market where consumers are voting for Blu-ray by a 2:1 margin, and effectively slams the door on loyal customers who believed that the studio had committed to a neutral stance? Paramount & Dreamworks might as well hang a "FOR SALE" sign on their doors -- the message they've sent is "Screw the market and our consumers -- we can be bought and sold."

U bly ray fans here are hilarious. You bag paramount for going exclusive. What about blu ray exclusive companies? Same thing, except now it's happening to your precious blu ray. You think Sony has no monetary deals in place securing exlcusivity? Your dreaming. HD DVD all the way!

No one's disputing that both HD DVD and Blu-ray camps have exclusive deals in place. The point is that those exclusive deals were in place before both products came to market. Paramount announced they were neutral before they ever released a single disc. Now that they've back-tracked (and they're the only company to have reversed their decision), they've left a lot of their own consumers in the lurch. You can take a mocking tone all you want, Tyler, but in the end Paramount's decision only creates more confusion for consumers and prolongs mass adoption of hi-def video in either format -- already one of the worst product launches in home video history.

All this does is prolong the inevitable, which is HD-DVD going the way of the Beta Max. There are more Blu Ray players on the market now, and Blu-Ray movies sale 2-1 over HD-DVD. I think the key player in this is Disney, who is exclusive to Blu Ray. Someone who has kids isn't going to buy a HD-DVD player if they can't get the big Disney movies for them. I've read a lot about people talking about how 'Shrek the 3rd' is exclusive to HD-DVD, yet all three Spider-Man movies are exclusive to Blu Ray. If Toshiba and Sony really want to see sales go up, they should convince Wal-Mart to take BRD's and HD-DVD's out of the video game case and put them on the shelf where you can just pick them up. Regular DVD's weren't any more expensive when they first came out (I paid $25 for Varsity Blues) than the new discs are and they were out on the shelf.

Paramount made the right choice. A local fanboi flipped all of the HD DVDs face down on the shelves at my local Wal Mart - shows what a bunch of crybabies the BR crowd is. I also like how you always see the parethesized Speilberg statement when discussing Paramount: just because he can release on both formats is no guarantee he will. Watch tissue sales skyrocket as every BR fanboi mops up her tears if such a thing happens to occur - I'll laugh wildly! To this day BR is still a developing technology released prematurely out of Sony's fear that they would not have a proprietary format to charge people up the wazoo for - and you fools still want them to have a monopoly over you. How dumb is that?