As summer progressed I feel it became rather evident that HD DVDs best tactic was to simply "survive" in order to protect investment and patents, and this tactic was undertaken by drastic cost cutting of hardware with the five-free movies bundle and Universal churning out catalogue releases at speed. The format clearly was looking to be in less and less of a position to achieve market dominance (something which may still not change even with Paramount/Dreamworks on its side).

In feeling as if their best chance of a longer term existence lay in a dual format environment then by paying for Paramount's exclusivity the HD DVD camp have pretty much assured themselves of that future, unless the majority of retailers opted to exert their power (which I am not even sure they're aware they have) and made the decision to stock one format and one format only for the sake of the consumer and the long term future of a hi def media format. If retailers and consumers were confused before, then now things are likely to be even worse and the split between studios and the formats is now great enough to really force people into buying both or neither format at all. Honestly, no amount of dual format players is going to solve that problem because the longer this goes on for, the less likely people are to buy into any HD format, and in turn the less likely studios and smaller distributors are to release a larger and more diverse range of content.

All this nonsense does nothing for me other than to ensure I just continue to sit this out and watch from the sidelines. I've genuinely no desire to humour both parties in buying and supporting two seperate formats. I'll always be furious at them for having the audacity to allow this state of affairs to occur in the first place.

Last edited by DanielB; 2007-08-21 08:42.