Sony Declares Blu-ray the Winner in Format War

by , 12:00 PM EST, February 13th, 2007

Blu-ray has won the format war against HD DVD according Sony Pictures Home Entertainment worldwide president David Bishop. Citing January sales numbers from Neilsen VideoScan, the Sony executive feels confident enough to declare victory. The story was covered at High-Def Digest on Saturday.

"The message that we’re going to put out to the consumer now is, now it is safe to make a choice," explained Bishop. "No more fence-sitting is needed... We have a critical mass of content, we have the biggest mass of consumer electronics companies in the world supporting this format. That has moved Blu-ray into the forefront."

Not everyone agrees, however. January was a good month for Blu-ray with 25 new Blu-ray titles compared to just 11 for HD DVD. However, HD DVD retains an overall lead according to ITwire on Monday which also pointed out that while Sony may be wrong to declare the war over, they are right to conclude that the war will be fought by the Sony marketing department.

Sony is fueling interest in Blu-ray by giving away a free copy of Casino Royale with the first 500,000 Playstation PS3s.

Despite being the technically superior format, Blu-ray has taken a beating in the format war due to the lower priced HD DVD players which has swayed customers. Now it remains to be seen if Sony's new marketing campaign and seeding via PS3 can overcome the early HD DVD lead.

Apple, which supports the Blu-ray format, has been slow to make Blu-ray an official option in its computers, preferring instead to make the hard disk the preferred format for video storage in iTunes. However, it is still unknown whether Hollywood movie studios will ever make HD content available via iTunes, and that has implications for Apple's new Apple TV which, currently, cannot access the Mac's optical disk. How all this plays out will ultimately depend on Apple's relationships with the movie studios, especially Sony Pictures.