Audio Video News

Tuesday's surprise announcement that Paramount and DreamWorks would drop Blu-ray for HD DVD caused quite a flutter in the home theater community. Following are a few notes in the aftermath of the PR explosion.

First, our original story on the subject left out a telling detail. Paramount's HD DVD deal has a time limit of 18 months. Hmmm. Or as the Blu-ray people would say, hmmmmmmmm.

In what looked like a Blu-ray counterattack, Fox and MGM announced a slate of 29 new titles, as Shane reported on our sister website UltimateAV. It's a good bet that they were already in the pipeline but Fox's and MGM's announcements got rushed out in the wake of Paramount's and DreamWorks' announcements.

An amusing look at the behind-the-scenes PR wrangling appeared in c|net's Crave blog.

After appearing initially tongue-tied, Blu-ray weighed in with an official response. See IGN.com for full version with bulletpoints.

The Blu-ray partisans at Blu-ray.com weighed in with a commentary of their own.

But not everyone's buying the Blu-ray party line. Quoth Engadget HD: "This might be the watershed moment that could give HD DVD the advantage. Of course this thing is a long way from over and anything could happen, but the prediction that the format war will be over this holiday season seems really silly now."

Finally, the "quality" theme that recurred in so many pro-HD DVD executive quotes got some elaboration in a news analysis by ArsTechnica. While not discounting the financial motive--the HD DVD people primed the pump with $150 million in promotional lucre--this interview with Paramount's chief technical officer suggested there might be technical reasons for HD DVD's surprise coup.

Alan Bell of Paramount got specific about several factors not previously cited in Tuesday's coverage, including include HD DVD's "very consistent, stable specification," its minimum connectivity requirements, and its uniform Microsoft-sourced standard for interactive content.

Oops, almost forgot to mention this: Onkyo's DV-HD805 HD DVD player will be available this fall. The price of $899 will make it the high-end option in the HD DVD universe, also expanding to include Toshiba's third-generation players.