Okay so everybody hammer BDA for paying 500M. So what was HD-DVD;s offer? 450M? 499M? The last time I checked in order to have crazy bids, you must be bidding against someone.

This is a rumor dude...

Although Warner is with Blu-ray, I still don't think they paid 500 million for it.

Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are also paid a royalty for the media. After the dust clears what is stopping either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray from upping the fee. An increase in royal of 10 cents a disk is 120M per year based on DVD sales.

Microsoft is gonna blow everyone away by announcing that the next OS for PCs will be available in HD-DVD discs only killing the format war in favor of Toshiba!

@libellule

I agree a payoff is possible. At this point Blu-Ray was probably desperate to leave, so to get them to decide earlier they might have paid them off. I just think $500,000,000
is such a huge amount.

But your just providing the source, not starting the rumor. I just think 50 million would be more reasonable, since it seemed like Blu-Ray was on the way to winning anyways. Just a little cash to seal the deal.

Off-topic:
And to those people saying Sony doesn't pay people off, I am a Sony fan, but I don't believe Sony are in any way saints. They may not be as bad as Microsoft because they are a little more stubborn, but I believe Sony pays people off when they dont have 70% of the market share like they did with the PS2.
(run-on sentence)

Usually in these types of deals, nothing is actually paid. In most cases it's a waiver of licensing fees. The same goes with exclusive video game deals. It's still lost future revenue however.

This is what is stupid. The whole lure of getting on board a winning format to begin with was to reap a lot of the profits. You know, for every Blu Ray sold, you would get money. But now look: there are so many companies involved, the cost of the players and the movies are plummeting. It seems like a complete waste.

And I've heard a strategy that Microsoft is employing, where it deliberately wants both formats to lose, so it can get ahead in the downloadable movies. And that really is the future. I don't think there's any doubt about it. There is little future for hard discs, and certainly not crappy Blu Ray and HD DVD. 

WHo cares is not our money. If anything HD-DVD only made someone or a company lose half a million dollars out of their billions LOL. About time they got aggressive. Seriously Blu-ray aka Sony thought that they where just going to run shit without even trying. We all know digital distribution is where the future is headed so they lost a great opportunity to eliminate hd-dvd early on and now have to hope somehow Blue-ray takes off before digital distribution is here. It will become just like mp3's where people will just download things into their computer or TV etc and not want to deal with physical media.