vizunary said:
Warner Home Entertainment President Kevin Tsujihara says the studio took no pay-offs to exclusively back Blu-ray.
In a post-announcement conference call, Tsujihara flatly denied rumors that studio had accepted anywhere from 250M to $500M in exchange for dropping its HD DVD format support.
According to the exec, Warner's sole motivation in dropping its HD DVD format support was to ensure growth of the "category" and the long-term health of the industry.
"The packaged media business is a $42 billion dollar business worldwide at the retail level, and we [Warner] have the largest market share of anybody," said Tsujihara. "From our perspective, the most important piece of this whole puzzle is, "How do we get growth back into this category?" That far outweighed anything else."
This [decision] was one hundred percent around what makes the most sense for the consumer, the retailer and the industry. This was not a bidding war. This was all about what was best, strategically, for us."
Stay tuned for more news from the Tsujihara conference call shortly...
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Warner/Warner:_No_Payoff_for_Move_to_Blu-ray/1327
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Common knowledge? More like media fodder, I've never even heard of this allegation of payoffs, which would have legal ramifications if kept secret from their shareholders at the least. The PRESIDENT of Warner would have no reason to lie about this, Paramount certainly did not deny HDDVDs desperation attempt to stay afloat.
@aquietguy, sorry you are wrong, they absolutely did NOT count PS3's in official sales counts of BD players sold.
@tuoyo, no we do not agree, it certainly helped, but there were quiet a few poles done of PS3 owners that neither used or even understood the BD capabilities of their systems, let alone had HD setups to take advantage of it. By now more of those owners most likely utilizing that capability than in the 1st year of release though.
OT: Essentially the only place there was a "format war" was the US, Blu-ray was the format of choice in nearly all other regions, especially Japan. Plus, the 360 would have crashed and burned just lie many others have said.
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