Re: Breaking News!! Warner is soon to be Blu-Ray Exclusive!
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Originally Posted by Robert Crawford
As RAF stated in that same edited post you quoted, "everything is fair in love and war". Furthermore, I find the behavior of many of the zealots from both sides of the fence rather funny in their thought processes.
Crawdaddy
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I don't disagree with that. People and organizations will do whatever it takes to ensure victory in a war, even one as inconsequential as a video war. I, personally, did not have any particular problem with Paramount taking the money and going exclusive with HD DVD. They made a decision that they felt was in their best financial interest at the time. In fact, I consider that Paramount got the best of the deal, because their support of HD DVD has been at best lukewarm.
Their exact analogue on the Blu-ray side lies in Fox. Fox was able to squeeze another 120 million out of the BDA, in addition to whatever they were initially paid, to remain Blu-ray exclusive, even though their actual support of the format has been virtually worthless. The only thing that saves Fox is that whatever they have released has come with lossless tracks. Paramount couldn't even be bothered to do that for their releases on HD DVD.
The unfortunate thing is that Warner, the one studio to really support both formats with a regular slate of releases, comes off looking like the bad guy because economic and financial considerations caused them to finally make a decision to support one format.
Economically, releasing on HD cannot be a big money maker for them at present and the costs of continuing to produce identical releases for two formats has got to be costing them a lot of money. Somebody in the organization had to have been putting pressure on to cut out some of the costs by going single format only.
Financially, it just makes sense to go with whoever offers the bigger number. I mean, given that the BDA offered 500 million and HD DVD offered some lesser amount, how long would any of the management at Warner still be working if they had decided to take, for example, 100 million dollars less just because they preferred the format? All I can say is the exit door would be hitting them on their butts before the ink had dried on the cheque.
AFAIAC, out of all of these studios Warner has, by far, done the best job in supporting these formats by actually releasing product. Sure a lot of their releases were missing lossless tracks on BD, but at least they were actually putting out good number of releases. The other studios in this whole debacle have been nowhere near as good as Warner when it comes to actually supporting HDM with releases.
They finally had to make a decision to jump one way. One side offered more than the other. They would have been crazy to not take the money. To not take it would have been career suicide, not to mention all of the angry shareholders that would have resulted.
