No sooner has Toshiba withdrawn the HD DVD format to let Blu-ray emerge winner in the long-running HD DVD vs Blu-ray war, one of HD DVD's staunch supporters, Universal Pictures, has lost no time in defecting to Blu-ray. A Reuters report quotes Craig Kornblau, president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Universal Pictures Digital Platforms as saying, "The path for widespread adoption of the next-generation platform has finally become clear. The emergence of a single, HD format is cause for consumers, as well as the entire entertainment industry, to celebrate."
Universal values the close partnership it shared with Toshiba, however it's time now to turn the focus on releasing new and catalog titles on Blu-ray, Kornblau said. Now that Universal has stepped across to the Blu-ray side of the fence, it is expected that other HD DVD supporters including Viacom, Paramount Pictures, and DreamWorks Animation will follow suit. Paramount seemingly is the immediate next after Universal. The company has always been confused over which format to support. In the initial days, it supported HD DVD, then switched to Blu-ray in 2005, then again back to HD DVD in 2007.
Meanwhile, analysts had time and again predicted that Blu-ray had the potential to become Hollywood's next preferred standard for high-definition content. Apparently, the growing popularity of Gen-Next gaming consoles resulted in the raging conflict between the two formats. By that standard, Blu-ray's success can be credited -- at least in some measure -- to Sony's PS3 which comes equipped with a Blu-ray DVD player.
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