Warner Bros' move to dump HD-DVD in support of Blu-ray comes as a major boost to the latter. But the battle is far from being over. Nobody likes a format war—it’s not fun, it’s very time-consuming and it confuses consumers.

Only a year ago, Sony and Toshiba, promoters of the two rival high-definition video storage formats, promised to make it an evenly contested war for the top honors in the $24 bn global home DVD market (including total sales and rentals of DVDs in 2007), still dominated by older, traditional DVD players. However, then came the twist in the tale when in January 2008 Warner Bros Entertainment, owned by media powerhouse, Time Warner Inc., announced that it would release its high-definition DVD titles exclusively in the Blu-ray disc format starting from June this year. The two formats deliver high-definition pictures and sound, but are incompatible with each other. Also neither plays on older DVD players, adding to the dilemma of consumers. According to CEO Barry Meyer, the reason for the top Hollywood studio's decision to rally behind Blu-ray, which outsold rival Toshiba's HD-DVD by a huge margin of 3:1 in 2007, is: "The window of opportunity for high-definition DVD could be missed if format confusion continues to linger."

Warner Bros, which had been the only major studio left backing both the formats, has become the fifth studio to support Sony's Blu-ray; in contrast, only two studios now support the HD-DVD format, developed by Toshiba Corp. Warner Bros accounts for almost a fifth of all the titles sold in the US. The company said sales of Blu-ray discs in the US generated $169 mn last year, while sales of discs in the HD-DVD format totaled $103 mn.

Both the formats were launched in the first half of 2006 with the HD-DVD being the first to hit the market in March, while the first Blu-ray disc title was released two months later in June. The HD-DVD was developed by the Japanese electronics major, Toshiba Corp and backed by a slew of technology leaders like Microsoft, Intel and NEC among others as well as film studios like Warner Bros, Paramount and Universal, while Blu-ray project, which was launched by Sony, has been supported by technology leaders like Apple, Dell, HP and studios such as Twentieth Century Fox, Walt Disney Pictures, and now Warner Bros. The name Blu-ray is derived from the underlying technology, which utilizes a blue-violet laser to read and write data.

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