If you read between the lines in several articles about this exclusivity declaration, it looks like the higher authoring/pressing costs of Blu-ray turned Paramount off. Plus they at least stated lower hardware costs of HD DVD appealed to them (from an adopter standpoint).
what do you think the authoring costs to be? as for replication how much more can it be? they sold around 2x as many BDs as HD DVDs. Once the video transfer is done the major video cost is done, once the PCM is created to create what ever you want the cost to DD, DD+, DTHD or keeping it PCM is minimal. What costs them so much?
As for the HW cost? how does that affect them how much you or I paid for the player. If they do care so much then continuing supporting both will save money to the majority of people (since anyone with BD won't need to buy an other player and anyone with nothing can buy what they want) if it is the delusion that a cheaper price will prevail, then how come it has not worked so far? HD DVD has always been cheaper. They could just wait and see what happens.
Let me ask you these few simple questions
1)do you agree that they have most likely done some (if not all the work) on the announced titles that should be coming out soon?
2)Do you agree that once a title has a master there is no more mastering costs and the only cost left is replication?
3)So if it is truly cost to them and cost to us wouldn’t it have made more sense to just continue with the BDs that have been released and that have a ready master and just stop releasing new BD titles that were not in the pipe line?
What you are missing is that what happened IS ILLEGAL and so, like any crook, you need to make reasonable doubt. The problem is that unlike Universal where it was easier to hide the real reason and make reasonable doubt “we chose HD DVD first and we don’t think the market is big enough to re-evaluate our position”. In this case HD DVD was haemorrhaging and needed to try and slow down BD or else Toshiba and MS would lose.
Of course, people will believe what they want to believe, and I'll admit that my first impression when I heard the news was that a payoff had probably been made.
agree and when your logical self knows it is a bribe (I don't like payoff because incentives can be anything while payoff gives the illusion of a suitcase filled with unmarked bills) but you choose to ignore it, that is the definition of a fanboy. Choosing to believe in something that makes no sense to you let alone to anyone else.
And, of course, even if true, this is no different than the alleged payoffs of Fox and Disney that made them Blu-exclusive.
what alleged payoffs? except for someone in this thread trying to make excuses for HD DVD I have not seen any source that talked of payoffs for them. The problem with this is that choosing to support the format that is selling much better makes perfect business sense.
