It was debunked a while ago on highdefdigest, this "news" is at least 2 months stale.
It all comes from one mans blog.
Obviously they didn't try to contact Warner or Sony hard enough.
Here's Warners denial, from nearly 2 months ago.
Warner: No Payoff for Move to Blu-ray
Fri Jan 04, 2008 at 07:56 PM ETWarner 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."
http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Warner/Warner:_No_Payoff_for_Move_to_Blu-ray/1327
