Blu-ray zaps HD-DVD

Inbox:I don't know about you, but I like my DVD player. Yes, yes, I know, writes  Mike Butcher.

Just another sad geek obsessing about his technology again. But here's the reason: it just works. A bit like a toaster, it's an appliance not a technology. Pop in a disk and you can watch a movie.

That's it. So when Sony and Toshiba started a war for the next generation of high-definition DVD, everyone, including me, groaned.

But that war appears to be at an end. Sony won. But how, and why so fast?

The first blow to Toshiba's HDD format came just before January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Warner Brothers Entertainment, one of the biggest movie studios, announced that, starting in June, it would issue all its movies in Sony's Blu-ray format instead of HD-DVD. That meant that three-quarters of all high-definition movies will be offered only in Blu-ray. Closer to home, HD-DVD also took a hit with news that British retailer Woolworths would no longer carry the format in its 820 stores starting in March, selling HD-DVD online only.

The second major blow to HD-DVD arrived this week.

Europeans now own more than 55,000 HD-DVD players and add-on HDD drives for their Xbox 360 games consoles, according to analysts Screen Digest. Microsoft has been a staunch backer of the HDD format since launch.

Unfortunately, that figure pales beside the number of Sony PlayStation 3s sold in in Europe: 750,000. Research company Understanding & Solutions found that during 2007, Blu-ray discs outsold HD-DVD by a ratio of three to one, with Blu-ray passing the million disc mark in November last year.

What this means is that Sony's massive leap of faith that people would also watch movies on their games machines has paid off. It was an audacious game-plan. Everyone knew that the PS3 would cost more to buy than the Xbox because it came with a Blu-ray player built in.

Standalone Blu-ray disc players have not sold in great numbers and are more expensive.

Even though people who have bought standalone HD-DVD players tend to buy more discs, there are fewer of those players compared to the Blu-Ray-playing PS3s in the market. So if studios must come out with Blu-Ray versions, so goes the thinking, they may as well cut the HD-DVD version altogether and save money.

Of course, this does not mean the format war is over yet, and one of the biggest players remains the "old-fashioned" DVD format. In the UK, for instance, normal DVD sales were at 250 million in 2007, up 29 million discs on the previous year.

However, if you plan to future-proof yourself against a last-minute revival of the HDD format there is always the option of buying a player that will play Blu-ray and HD DVD discs, not to mention traditional DVDs. The LG Super Blu BH200 or the Samsung BD-UP5000 are just such players, and I must say I'm tempted by the thought of opting out of this battle altogether. What did John Lennon say again?

War is over?