Blu-ray to \'Overwhelm\'

    September 08, 2005

Thomas Arnold has an article up at Home Media Retailing today which has some comments from Sony's president, Benjamin Feingold, who has been relatively quiet about things lately in the camp. A lot of questions have been raised between the scaling back of plans by some Hollywood studios while the entire HD-DVD launch was pushed back to 2006. In one interesting quote according to chief HD-DVD cheerleader Mark Knox, "Toshiba spokesman Mark Knox, an advisor to the company’s HD DVD Promotion Division, confirmed the delay. He noted that Toshiba will begin rolling out HD DVD players in Japan in February, and expects to have plenty of software support from Japanese suppliers, including a significant selection of anime titles." With Buena Vista controlling the Ghibli catalog in Japan, it is likely that they won't be putting their films on that but on the Blu-Ray format. Between this and the Playstation 3 release, each side is lining up their big guns and not backing down though many have surmised that HD-DVD is dead in the water. While not telling of things overall, it appears that they have completely dropped any intent of putting out the triple layer HD-DVD format and that it was a gamble to try and get Disney on their side as Disney has stated storage capacity as key to their involvement as they want to be able to combine games and other interactive materials to their animated line of films on the next format.