Netflix Dumps HD DVD For Blu-ray February 12, 2008
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There’s an alarmingly trend forming around the high-def movie format, HD DVD, which involves everyone dumping it for its rival, Blu-ray.
Online movie rental giant, Netflix, has joined Warner Bros., New Line Cinema and Woolworths in choosing to go with Blu-ray exclusively for its HD movies. And all of those desertions have occurred within the last 6 weeks. The company expects to have phased out HD DVD movies by the end of the year and no new HD DVDs will be added. Last year, Blockbuster showed HD DVD the door in the US by opting to go with Blu-ray only.
"The prolonged period of competition between two formats has prevented clear communication to the consumer regarding the richness of the high-def experience versus standard definition," said Ted Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix. "We're now at the point where the industry can pursue the migration to a single format, bring clarity to the consumer and accelerate the adoption of high-def. Going forward, we expect that all of the studios will publish in the Blu-ray format and that the price points of high-def DVD players will come down significantly. These factors could well lead to another decade of disc-based movie watching as the consumer's preferred means."
The company said that even though HD movie rentals are a small portion of its overall business, Blu-ray rentals far outweighed those of HD DVDs. In total, Netflix ships around 1.6m movies per day.-Martin Lynch
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
Contributor | Tamlin Magee
Comments
I'm sorry...this IS Gizmodo UK right?
Exactly what is the point of having several different Gizmodo versions if we are to be fed American-centric stories anyway? When has Netflix been availiable to the UK market? They flrted with a UK service way back in 2004 and nothing has been heard since so why are you reporting this to us?
Its handy for predicting trends:-
If the HD-DVD format is being abandoned everywhere else on the planet, wouldn't you like to hear about it?
I agree with Tes. As for "wouldn't you like to hear about it?", well yes, but since the US Gizmodo is available too then not as if can't read that too. I would imagine everyone interested in Gizmodo in the UK, like me, would also look at the US version all the time too. So becomes a matter of reading the same story twice.
Should really be like a Gizmodo which has all the articles from *all* the Gizmodo world sites and then you could filter down to each location if you wish for the more local stories.
Agreed with the above couple of comments. I have checked out some of the international sites (whilst I still read the US version mainly) and Australia has it the best. It has the same design as the US version, with all US stories + local content and editing content that is US only affected (such as this story).