Spontaneous Monotony

When Warner Bros. (makers of the Harry Potter film series, among others) announced that it was going Blu-ray exclusive the other day many people predicted that this was the beginning of the end for HD-DVD. Now it seems that Paramount is about to activate a get-out clause in its HD-DVD exclusivity deal and switch to Bluray. Now of course this could just be dismissed as internet rumour-mongering (remember those ‘Xbox 360 with builtin HDDVD drive’ rumours? Wherefore art thou Romeo :P) if it wasn’t for a slight detail. This story comes from the Financial Times. It now seems that HD-DVD will not face a long, lingering fight against inevitable death, but instead has a date with a firing squad in the very near future. Time to start buying those Sony S300s folks!

Despite being (for the moment) an inferior choice as a games console compared to the Xbox 360, the PS3 looks like making a name for itself as a media hub. Not only the Blu-ray player (the PS3 is currently about £400 cheaper than Play.com’s cheapest standalone player), but now it will also have a digital tv addon and Tivo/Sky+-like recording functions. I think this is actually quite a good idea on Sony’s part - they’ve realised that the Xbox 360 probably has too much of a head start for them to compete on a games-vs-games basis (as with the previous generation, the Xbox was a better console than the PS2 but had poorer games and no momentum), so they now plan to get people to buy them for their media functions. I suspect there are probably more people looking for a Bluray-playing PVR than there are looking for a games console with a lacklustre software library.