The George Lite Zone

After Warner Brothers recent announcement that it was switching to Blue Ray, another death knell was heard pealing for the HD DVD player. Prior to Warner's move the hardware market sales were split roughly 50/50. Sales figures after the sale (week ending 12th January 2008) were 90/10 in favor of the blue boy. Like Monty Python's Black Knight, Toshiba are insisting that the fights not over yet and that the disparity was down to their removal of a Christmas discount and the bundling of Blue Ray players with some flat panel TV's by certain awfully nice manufacturers. In a move to fight back, Toshiba swung a mighty kick at their foe by cutting the price of their players. To paraphrase King Arthur in Holy Grail, "Look, you stupid bastards. You've got no arms left!" On the blue ray front, news that a lot of existing players wont be able to play disks coming out next year that have features included in the BD Video Final Standard Profile 1.1. With profile 1.1 persist...

Following on from Warner's announcement of switching exclusively to Blue Ray , New Line Cinema , has announced an immediate switchover to the Blue Format. Not too surprising as it is owned by Time Warner, which is the parent company of Warner Brothers. New Line Cinema have the Lord of The Rings and Austin Powers series in their portfolio. So that's Austin, Dr Evil and Gandalf joining Bugs & Mickey in the blue corner. Yeah, baby, yeah.

In a galxy not so far away, another blow was struck for the Sony Empire with Warner anouncing that they will be exclusively releasing their material on the Blue Ray format. They said that they would continue to release HD DVDs untill the end of May, with these releases following on from DVD and Blu-ray releases. This is a massive blow in favour of the blue camp. Warners are Holywood's biggest DVD seller, with a market share of 18 to 20 percent of US sales and are one of the few studios to back both formats. With both Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny batting for the blue ray team now, it will be difficult to see of a way back for HD DVD. Unless Bill Vader and his chums at Toshiba can complete work on that Death Star...