This is a rumor, that is all. I suspect, however, if the BDA payed any amount of money to get Warner it was to counter a HDDVD offer that simply would not have been refused.

Sorry but this statement is silly.  Toshiba is trying to make money, thats what companies do.  If you don't like it, don't buy but stop acting like its a personal insult to you that they are marketing a competing product.

mr-money has got a point there, although I like the HD discs (the quality is superb), it probably won't be long until renting and buying movies is done by downloading them, and concidering the time it seems to take for the HD formats to go mainstream their reason for existing can be argued.

 Agreed. The HD format wars have been going BluRay's way for quite a while, so Warner's support was implicit imo.

I dont think this is such a huge amount o money ...

BTW : MGM would have stayed with BRD no matter what Warner chooses ...

this is fake.. they denied this yesterday

http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Warner/Warner:_No_Payoff_for_Move_to_Blu-ray/1327

"Warner: No Payoff for Move to Blu-ray
Fri Jan 04, 2008 at 07:56 PM ET
Tags: Warner (all tags)

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."

Lol....actually your statement is funny.  I could care less which format wins as long as one is decided soon.  I want to buy HD movies and these corporate battles are bullshit.  I applaud Warner for trying to end the format war for the consumer.  If blu-ray wins, I'll buy blu-ray, if HD-DVD wins, I'll buy HD-DVD--I just want a winner SOON.  By going with the product that was currently in the lead, Warner did the sensible thing. 

I can tell by your complete lack of understanding that you are too young to understand what happened with Betamax....so I'll not hold your naive statements against you--you probably were still wearing diapers.  In my case, I first hand remember what happened with Betamax (luckily we went with VHS), but my next door neighbor lost a lot of money because of that format war.  2 Betamax players and 47 videos later, it WAS ALL WORTHLESS. 

(And just so you realize, I'm far from a fanboy...lol, I actually have an HD-DVD add-on for my 360 (got it for Christmas) and I support all three consoles.)

Yes in my opinion this is fake.
Warner said that they would support the winning format.
They said they would support the peoples choice and probably wanted
to see what unfolds during the holiday season to make their decision
(to see if HD-DVD could pull a win with its cheaper players).
clearly blu-ray won, why would they chose HD-DVD?

i would think this is just some HD-dvd diehard fan's dribble.
trying to comfort their format-of-choice lost by saying BDA cheated.
that they would have won if BDA didnt pay a cool $500 mil.

Warner offically said they were not paid so I take this rumor with a massive grain of salt.