Originally posted by: zombie84
Well that is certainly interesting. Sigh, the end of the war has now been put off a few more months. I wonder how much payola was involved to get that deal.

Its worth noting, however, that the first Spielberg film to be released on hi-def will be on Blu Ray though...

I think it's worth noting that Spielberg's films will probably only be released on Blu-Ray, especially since that's practically what the press release said.

The end of the war hasn't been put off for a few months. No, if anything, the war would have ended in a few months. Now, we've got Shrek the Third and Transformers coming exclusively to HD-DVD. Go read some of the latest columns over at digitalbits. This will do nothing but prolong the war. They, and others, are speculating that this could even cause Warner Brothers to go exclusive to HD-DVD. If that happens, the formats will be evenly split between all the studios.

Two things can happen if that happens. Either low cost dual format players hit the market, which consumers will happily snap up, or hi-def totally dies. If there are no low cost players and two competing formats in the next couple of years, hi-def will go nowhere. No one wants to invest in one format only to end up with obsolete hardware. All this is going to do is prolong the war, to everyone's detriment.

For the record, it's being reported that Microsoft gave them (Paramount and DreamWorks) $150 million dollars to go HD-DVD exclusive. Make no mistake though, this could end up killing both formats. Without a low cost player (probably sub $300) or a single format, hi-def will end up a niche market, similar to DVD-Audio and SACD. I'm summarizing most of this from digitalbits, but I think they're spot on. Well, except for the part about a dual format player. I think if a cheap dual format player comes to market this Christmas, it won't matter won't format a movie is on. Of course, even if the player debuts at $500, the not so early adopters will snap it up so they can play both formats and then the price will do nothing but drop. That's exactly what happened when dvd+r and dvd-r were at war. The burners were expensive until dual format ones hit the market. Now you can find them for $30 (my first dual format drive was $250).

If hi-def formats die, the next big thing will be hi-def downloads direct to media center PCs. More and more people are installing those and as long as you can connect it to your TV, you don't really have to worry about formats. Divx, Xvid, MP4, WMV, VC-1, they can all be played through the computer as long as the right codecs are installed.