Warner announced on the eve of the Las Vegas show that it is going Blu-ray exclusive, and the high definition disc war ended that afternoon. Everything since has been paperwork.
The arithmetic is brutal and it is not really about Warner’s own catalogue, large as it is. It is about what the announcement does to the remaining fence-sitters. HD DVD’s entire position rested on holding enough studio support to make the format a real choice rather than a gamble. Lose the largest hedging studio and the format is left with a minority of the films people actually want to watch, at which point no retailer wants the shelf space and no consumer wants the risk. Formats do not die slowly once that starts.
Toshiba’s response has been to cut player prices, which is the correct move and the wrong problem. Nobody declined to buy an HD DVD player because it cost too much. They declined because they could not be certain the discs would still be sold in three years, and the price cut is itself an admission that confirms the fear.
What decided this was the console, and I want to be honest that I got the shape of that right and the reasoning half wrong. I wrote in December 2006 that Sony had bolted a format war onto a games machine and asked players to fund it, and that this was simultaneously the most expensive part of the PlayStation 3 and the smartest thing Sony did that year. Both halves turned out to be true. Every PS3 sold was a Blu-ray player installed in a household whether or not the buyer cared, and Microsoft’s decision to sell HD DVD as an accessory meant its equivalent number was a rounding error.
So Sony has won the format war using a console that has otherwise had a difficult two years, and the victory is worth considerably less than it would have been in 2004.
That is the part I would put in front of anybody celebrating at Sony this month. The thing being fought over is a plastic disc, and the sensible advice I gave a year ago was to buy neither and wait, on the grounds that whichever format won might get to be the last one. Nothing since has made me want to withdraw that. Broadband has improved. The console under the television downloads films. The set-top box does too.
Blu-ray now gets to be the high definition physical format, and it gets that title at the moment physical formats stop being where the growth is. It will sell well for years, because catalogue and picture quality and the fact that a disc works when the connection does not are all real advantages, and it is difficult to see it ever being the thing that defines a decade the way DVD did.
Toshiba should stop now rather than in six months. There is no dignity available in the alternative and there is real money in the exit.