Ah, clandestine meetings, big moves on the horizon, what if Warner went exclusive -- oh how the spinmeisters come a-waging their pens! Warner has been meeting with both camps and the scuttlebut is that alot more then money is being tossed around. And alot more money then Paramount settled for. BIG DEAL!!! Warner is in the drivers seat, they sell more HD discs then anybody (this includes Universal) and they don't have to do a thing. They had this thing knocked with their TotalHD disc until Paramount got the big payday and that product is still in play. Maybe Warner is meeting with everyone to try and convince both sides to accept the TotalHD disc as a way for both sides to win. Have any of you thought about that?
Interesting note, if Warner decided to go HD-DVD exclusive all that would gain is a 70% drop in disc sales (Paramount has not made up the differance in loss of BD disc sales with the sales of any of their titles that they have released and this includes Transformers and Shrek3). And that decision would not end this perceived format war as it would just make the supporting studios even. Heck, it probably only give HD-DVD the chance to break even and win a few weeks -- this would not bring an end to the format war.
I am going to standby my belief that it will be the retailers who end this for us.
As for my original post, at one time as the US market went so went the rest of the world. We are no longer the world's leader. We are still the biggest money market but we don't wag the worlds tail the way we used to.
We are behind in the developement of the internet -- many countries have internets that are 5 times as fast as the average in this country. We are the only country that allows multiple cellphone standards thus we have the worst cellphone networks in the world. Heck, third world countries have better cellphone networks then we do. Sometimes competition is not all that great. We no longer lead the world in manufacturing of anything other then guns -- and that is not something to be proud about.
My premise was that maybe the US market would not neccesarilly decide this format war that seems to only be happening in this country. I see that no one want to take up the task of debating this. I can see why. It is easier to call someone names, spread FUD and otherwise ignore what could be a deciding factor in which format is around two years from now. Seems reasonable debate might not be possible anymore.
