Just days ago, it was announced that Warner Brothers was officially dropping HD-DVD and focusing exclusively on Blu-Ray. With such a big company picking Blu-Ray, it begs the question whether HD-DVD is on it’s way to the deadpool. Paramount and Universal, though, were still on the HD-DVD bandwagon.
Now it appears Paramount may be making the switch to Blu-Ray as well, according to a story in the Financial Times.
The story says that Paramount had a clause in their contract with HD-DVD which allows them to switch teams in the event that Warner ever did. Now that that has occurred, Paramount is exercising that clause and following Warner out of HD-DVD’s door.
The switch of Warner put about 70% of Hollywood’s DVD output into the Blu-Ray camp. With Paramount making the move, this will increase.
While some would think this would be cork opening time for the Blu-Ray guys at Sony, the chief executive over there is offering a more humble tone. He says Sony still has a lot of work to do to make Blu-Ray widely accepted, and that he is open to dialogue with the rival HD-DVD camp to “grow the market”.
This has been a few bad days for HD-DVD, and these moves are significant enough that we may indeed see an end to the format war after all. Needless to say, I wouldn’t be making any investments into HD-DVD anytime soon.
Update!!
It now appears as if Paramount is DENYING this prior report, saying the report was speculative.
Paramount’s current plan is to continue to support the HD DVD format,” Brenda Ciccone, a spokeswoman for Paramount, said in an e-mail today.
This is what you get for being cutting edge and reporting news so early. 
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