HDDVD Murder Mystery

HDDVD passed away just over a week ago and what is interesting now are the various postmortems that are being conducted in the blogosphere:

"The PS2 may well have been a success without DVD, but DVD did not need the PS2.For the PlayStation 3, the issue was a lot murkier. While US sales of standalone -- that is to say, excluding PS3 -- players for Blu-ray and HD DVD were almost dead even in 2007, Blu-ray titles consistently outsold HD DVD titles. Part of this may have been due to Toshiba's heavy bundling of titles with HD DVD players, but PlayStation 3 owners seem to have bought Blu-ray movies in droves. While Sony consistently promoted Blu-ray's game and movie capacity as a PS3 selling point, the PS3 -- specifically its owners' embrace of Blu-ray movies -- was the major consumer factor in swinging the fate of the high-definition video disc for Blu-ray."

Engadget play the issue with a straight bat (above) but I prefer the conspiracy theories that are beginning to circulate. A recent discussion on the TWIT podcast took the line that Microsoft was never really interested in winning the HD war but it needed to clip the wings of Blu-Ray to maintain it's own interests. It suited Microsoft to have Sony expend huge amounts of time and money fighting a war over a movie format rather than pushing PS3. It also threw some doubt over Blu-Ray as one of PS3's key selling features (although if you believe one recent stat 60% of PS3 owners don't even know they have a Blu-Ray drive). Crucially the format war bought Microsoft time to wait for the Movie download business to take off, which naturally serves it best in the PC market. Far fetched maybe, but typically underhand nonetheless...