Does it really matter who paid who? I'm sure Blu-ray had done something like this one way or another. I mean do you think Fox, Disney, and Sony sided with Blu-ray because its better for us the consumer. Yah, right, whatever it is, We now know SKG/Dreamworks, and paramount are going to be HD-DVD.

My head hurts...

Why do these companies insist on torturing us with this damn format war?

Can't we all just get along???

(and by "get along" I mean "use HD-DVD"...)

(j/k...kind of)

And who said HD-DVD did not pay some people here and there?

I got a couple hundred thou for driving around town yelling "Blu-Ray Blu-Ray RAH RAH RAH" at the local blockbusters, so theres a little piece of the proverbial pie thats accounted for

eeehm, I am willing to promotionally consider putting a HD-DVD-drive into my notebook. Do you ave any idea who I have to ask for the 50 million?

"Paramount paid $150 to Dreamworks and Paramount"

I'm interested doing some freelance editing...what do you say?

All part of the American capitalistic milieu. To the victor goes the spoils!

people buy movies?

One company in the pocket of another company.

How about that. What a shocker?

KP

Woah, I must have stepped into Bizzaro world. When did corporations ever consider anything other then stock price and why isn't this anything other then good news for share holders?

If they indeed paid $150mm, wouldn't it have been smarter if they just decided to give away $150mm HD DVD players to all of us? If we had the hardware, we'd surely end up buying more DVDs. Would have been a better, smarter investment.

The players:
HD DVD - Toshiba (primary developer), HP, NEC, Sanyo, Microsoft, RCA, Kenwood, Intel . . .

Blu-ray - Sony (primary developer), Apple Inc., Dell, Pioneer, and Panasonic

and some straddle the fence

Note MS on one side and Apple on the other, but you know which side Pixar/Disney's on.

Interesting that Dreamworks is alleged to have been worth more than Paramount.

Oh well, after seeing Tranformers in the theatre, I have absolutely no desire to buyt or even rent a copy of that craptastic movie (though I'll take Megan Fox any day, Rowwwr).

If Blu-Ray wants to prosper what the BDA really has to do it to educate current blu-ray owners. Maybe work with Netflix to promote the use of Blu-Ray (since the cost is the same for users) on installed PS3s.

Disney is on BD side, check out the sites.

I agree with Contempt, subsidizing the cost of players or discs might help them get in more homes than paying studios. but maybe not.

so why havn't the consumers reaped any benefit from this war? All I feel from this shit is paranoia that i'm going to spend my money on a losing format :/

how long must this go on?

@aboriginal:

True, but Disney supports MS 360's Video Marketplace as well..

Those studious must have run the numbers and determined that they'd make more money taking the $150m than actually selling units. There's no other way that this makes sense. Since getting a PS3, I've bought a lot of BluRay movies (even crappy ones) just because they're in HD. I really can't imagine buying a standalone player just to play movies anymore so I guess I won't be buying any Paramount or Dreamworks releases for a while. I'd imagine there are a lot of other consumers in my position as well.

@DeadPlasmaCell: But not with the hd transfers, just in standard def (unless that's changed in the last couple of weeks).

@DeadPlasmaCell: Where there's some money to be made you can bet there's some cross-breeding going on which is why I'm perplexed at this format pissing match in the first place. Buy a 1000.00 Samsung combi-player and enjoy.

The problem with this war is that it is all happening before people are even ready to switch to a new format.

HD means dick-all to the majority of people who are still one 4:3 cathodic tubes.

They fight for people's interest... the problem is that there is 0 interest out there to fight over.

if hd dvd drive come with xbox. i may think about get one. otherwise. i'm happy with my blu-ray disc

@jaredgood1: All Disney movies are in HD (where possible) on XBL. They made a big deal of that fact at E3.

@Roams: No, just the opposite. It's worth fighting to win the war now because it's less expensive to do it now (imagine what it would take to pay off these studios a few years from now) and the payoff for emerging victorious will be huge down the road. Your comment does suggest that the people who think this is a minor stepping stone on the way to digital downloads are wrong -- most consumers won't want to deal with downloading and storing content, they just want to stick the movie in the machine and make it work -- something they have been doing for the past 20 years, whether VHS or DVD.

It's SACD and DVD-A all over again.

I'm thrilled with all the confusion. It will kill off the two HD disc formats and extend the shelf life of my current DVD libray until the all execs finally figure out the future is downloads.

As the music biz painfully has learned, the masses prefer fast, easy, cheap and universal - the very things no HD disc format can even pretend they come close to.

For a long time, I'd disagreed with everyone who said that downloads are the future - I thought that waiting an hour (more often, three or four) to download an HD film isn't practical. Now the format war is going to be extended - with no-one really knowing any more who'll come out on top, downloads seem like a much better alternative. If they can figure out how to avoid a Google Video-esque situation - where you suddenly stop owning a movie because the distributor has decided so - then we can forget this format-war bullshit and actually watch the movies we want in high-def.

There's no possible way for Sony, Toshiba, Microsoft or any of the studios to argue that this dual-format situation is anything but bad for the consumer, yet they continue. I mean, fuck - all we want to do is watch films. We aren't asking that they stop making inane, liberal-humanist pablum - just fucking make it easy to watch. Is it really so fucking hard?

I think the title of this article is grossly misleading. It seems to assert as fact that Paramount and Dreamworks received a pay out to distribute hd dvd solely. In the article however it becomes clear that this idea was nothing more than a suggestion from an unnamed "Hollywood blog". And using the assumption that the studios arent denying it as proof is even sillier. Dont get me wrong, I love Gizmodo and I read a bunch of other Blogsmith works, but this article is down right silly and near ly libelous.

There goes MS again, trying to usurp innovation and what the people want (Blu-Ray by far) by buying off companies...

back in the day(admittedly and undeniably dating myself) ,this played out once before

[www.mediacollege.com]

nothing new under the sun.....

quiality, value , and potential? hahah thats coplete bull, they were sellign more units on teh same movie on blu ray then they were on hd dvd.

I totally agree with everyone saying that this is a win for, more than anything else, digital content delivery. I think Apple and others who have good, reliable methods for downloading content and sharing it are in the best position of all.

They may not have HD downloads yet (XBox 360 marketplace does I believe), but it's only a matter of time.

I once thought that, though not as long as DVD's reign, the HD-DVD and/or Blu Ray would enjoy at least a few years of dominance before pure digital downloads took over.

If Apple chose to allow people to download directly from iTunes via Apple TV, I think they could really make a move with that little box.

Digital downloading is still years out. Until the broadband companies ease up on their backhaul and increase the individual bandwidth, it's just not practical to download a video in HD format. Not to mention there are still many places around the US that still doesn't receive over 1mbit.

It must be nice to be Microsoft though. First they buy exclusivity rights from Rockstar with GTA4 and now they buy media distribution rights from 2 major studios, minus the Steven Spielburg movies of course. If I was Paramount, I'd do the same thing though, 50/100mil is much more than they'll get by selling HD-DVD movies to an extremely lacking base.

@maklershed: No, there is evidendce that Microsoft & Toshiba dished out payola. Check out Aint It Cool News, Digital Bits, LA Weekly, or just Google it. Whats sad is that Studios claim they loose money on films and Paramount has a long standing policy never, ever to make a film that costs more than $35 million to shoot by itself. They invented the "co financing" deals. Fuck them. It costs them NO more money to "make" Blu-ray Discs and the BD-J kit is not anymore difficult than the HD-DVD camp with their XML / Java hybrid. Besides, DOES ANYONE ACTUALLY BUY THE MOVIE FOR THE GHETTO EXTRAS?

People keep comparing this whole thing to the VHS/BetaMax format war, but the way I see it, it's more like the Laserdisc thing, only with two losers instead of one. Like mentioned in one of the previous comments, it's too early for a new format. Most people are still in bed with their DVD's and really, the only benefit that comes from upgrading is more storage.

At least upgrading from VHS to DVD offered more features, AND was comparable in price to existing VHS at the time.

Here we go again, back and forth, back and forth, I know its the nature of a format war but, I bought and HD-DVD player when they jumped out to an early lead, then last month I bought a blu-ray player when they seemed to move to the lead, now HD-DVD hits with this blow, at least I am covered for any other eventualities.

You should think long & hard before committing your library to a 360/HD-DVD drive combo. You'd be better off buying a standalone player for ~$300 than the $500+ you'd spend on a 360/HD-DVD combo, and that's not just because of the price.

360's, until recently, were prone to overheating and dying; the new heatsink/heat pipe addition hasn't proven itself just yet. The 360's HD-DVD drive decodes almost everything in software, which sends the poor little 360 into overdrive, thus producing even more heat. Sounds like a bad idea to me.

I've been renting BDs from Netflix to play on the PS3 I bought when my fourth 360 went back to the service center. I'm not about to add an HD-DVD drive to this defective setup. I'd buy a standalone HD-DVD drive if there was anything worth owning on that format. As it is, I'm not buying on BD either. I don't want the extra content; I barely have time to watch an occasional movie, let alone all of the additional shovelware that tends to end up on most discs (that's not to say that *all* discs contain shovelware, but a good portion do).

i cant speak for the states but as far as i know, here i the uk...i know a few people with a ps3, but dont know any others with standalone blu ray players.
i have the 360 with the addon and so do a lot of my friends in this respect.
i have sold standalone hd dvd players...admittedly not that many, but alot more than blu ray....ie none....
i agree that there should have been one format for high def delivery so all this could be avoided, but as we know thats not the case.
with paramount making this switch, this could be a turning point, note that im saying it could be.
to say you should boycott them for this is lunacy...my son loves the potc movies but i dont...im not boycotting them coz they are only on bd for hi def...i just buy em for him on sd.
what alot of people are forgetting is that blu ray hardware has declined in the last quater, and paramount would know this...they also stated that the market research they based their decision (sp?) on showed flat out that there are more standalone hd dvd players than blu ray, and thats why they made their choice...im sure if it were the otherway round they would have dropped hd dvd in favour of bd.make sense?...paramount arent stupid and they wouldnt have made this choice lightly.
the hd dvd camp payed them to consider them only?...fine.....sony did the same for fox and disney.also fine...it is a business at the end of the day.
as far as im concerned, i have had misgivings about blu ray since day one......it launched half finished, the usual spin from sony claimed it would replace dvd in 3 years and its noweher near that mark...they also said that hd dvd was dead at the beginning of the year...it isnt...they also claimed they would sell 7 or 8 million ps3 (cant remember exactly how many to be fair) and they havent.
BD+ maybe a cute trick to have, but it will only be a matter of time before it is cracked/bypassed, history has shown that no matter how clever the encryption, it gets beaten pure and simple....i think this is why the hd dvd camp didnt bother with it as it adds to the expense of the discs, plus the potential added headache of compatability with older players.
what the bda should really be worried about is if warner decide to dump them...as warner have a soft spot for hd dvd since the get go....
put it this way NO movie company is going to willingly lose money in any territory..its amusing to see titles that are either sony produced or fox for example...available to buy on hd dvd (xxx / fantastic four for example)...now if anythings going to confuse people its going to be that.
i am a fan of hd dvd...its cheap, readily available and its friendly, especially the dual dvd/hd dvd...so what if it costs me a few quid more?..i can take the disc and watch it in the bedroom (dvd side)and rip it to my htpc, or watch it in the lounge on hig def..on one disc..you cant do that with bd.
paramount have made their choice and its only a good thing that they have taken a side, and i for one am glad its hd dvd.
michael bay has made moans about that move and claimed he wont do transformers 2, hes not that big a player in hollywood going by pearl harbour and the island...so in my book he got lucky, but if its in his contract to do a sequal...he has no say in the disc format anyway...an opinion yes....
theres my few pence worth

and yes i buy the discs with the extras...

First, gotta say as I've said elsewhere, I don't think that people will really care about the format war until they all get HDTVs. Owners are still a relatively small segment of the population, and until that changes, DVD will be king. Now, when people start getting HD-DVDs, and their $50 DVD players start making their existing library look like absolute crap... then they'll change over.

Secondly, having downloaded supposedly 1080p video from the PSN (and judging by the file sizes of the full HD movies offered by Live), they are compressed, and prone to some blocky-ness in addition to lower audio quality than either HD-DVD or Blu-ray. Digital distribution isn't the same quality as the next-gen discs. Fact is, digital distribution of HD quality video and high quality audio won't be feasible until two things happen: 1) higher bandwidth networks are established [some places STILL don't have broadband even now]; 2) Digital memory gets a whole hell of a lot cheaper. People LIKE keeping things they buy, and until multi-TB drives are available on the very cheap... this may not be possible. Like it or not, from a manufacturing standpoint, a plastic disc that can hold either 30GB or 50GB in space is cheaper than flash memory and the required bandwidth to send out HD video to EVERYONE who wants it. Can you imagine trying to download an at-minimum 5GB file from Warner Brothers on the day a movie like 300 releases?

As for the pissing war going on between the formats... I used to be a Blu-ray supporter, but now I don't care because by the time the whole thing is decided, either standalone player will be dirt cheap. The funny thing is to all the people talking about buying hybrid drives, it's cheaper now to buy one player each than most of the hybrid drives... Anyways, I digress. Point being, they need to get their shit together and get it done, and I do see this is as probably a last-ditch effort to save HD-DVD by throwing money at an until-the-end-of-the-year exclusivity deal. I'd like to know when Universal's deal is up, because that is the only way that a studio would willingly forego sales... if someone has made it worth their while. Oh, and don't let it be mistconstrued that Blu-ray's camp hasn't been doing the same, it's just that up until now they've been doing a better job of selling discs. Just looking at the sales comparo between 300 on BR and HD-DVD makes it clear that more people are buying BR even if HD-DVD has more features... so... studios, stop fighting because I want to watch Army of Darkness in HD already without shelling out $300 bucks.

In other news the format war between vertically rolled papyrus and horizontally rolled papyrus has yet to be decided with scribes in the vertical camp touting the ease of rolling, while horizontal scribes stick with their wide column widths.

Meanwhile, I just download videos to a hard drive and stream it to my HDTV. Legally, even. The installation medium is moot.