Come on HD-DVD, You can do it!

When it comes to the battle of the next-gen High Definition media, I’m a big supporter of HD DVD. I like HD DVD for a few reasons, for one it’s not as proprietary, it was designed as a format that multiple manufactures can make and multiple studios can use. Blu-ray on the other hand is all Sony, Sony makes them, Sony pushes the movie studios to use them, and Sony makes most of the players. I mean I know it’s still early in the game but you can already tell that Blu-ray will be overall a more restrictive format.

I’m starting to really hate Sony as a company because of the thousands of media formats they are throwing out there. For a while it’s like they came out with a new piece of media and new hardware to run it every week. For example, how many different versions of the Sony Memory Stick are there?! 6?! Maybe 7 I think, ridiculous. Oh, Then they have the UMD, that’s really taking off. The Minidisk, remember that? I can’t get rid of my Minidisk player. They are all going to die and be thrown into a museum of Sony’s failures alongside the Betamax.

Now we have the Blu-ray. Honestly, I hope it does die in the water. I’m seriously rooting for HD DVD but Blu-ray is actually putting up a fight. Over the last few months Blu-ray has actually been doing better in HD DVD in terms of video sales, I think the Playstation 3 plays a big part of that. It’s not over yet though, the reason I’m writing about this is because I came across an article tonight and it sounds like Paramount and DreamWorks Animation SKG announced that they will be switching their next-gen media to HD DVD. Paramount is a major studio so I’m interested to see if others will follow and what this means for Spielberg films which are all done through Paramount along with DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Nickelodeon Movies and MTV Films.

You can read about Paramount’s switch to HD DVD here. Also, take a look at this article that explains why Sony is constantly releasing new media formats.