http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/co ... exclusives


Seeing and hearing a very surprising amount of buzz around all this.

Regardless of anything else, I think we all know that CES 2008 will be a milestone marker of sorts in this format war and something that we will all want to keep tabs on when it happen on January 7, 2008.

Either way I see both formats hanging around. If Warner is waiting to see which format produces player sales -- not necessarily software sales -- there's no doubt Blu Ray standalones (minus the PS3) aren't doing anything.

In terms of software numbers I'm fascinated to see what is really going on too. Sales numbers are skewed heavily in favor of Blu Ray but every week they are giving discs away in 2-for-1 promotions -- literally -- and have been since TRANSFORMERS came out at the end of October.

My best guess is HD-DVD player sales have been fairly robust given how small this pool is right now, Blu Ray has an edge in software numbers given their promotions and bigger-profile titles, but no matter which way you go, it's not like HD-DVD is going to die if there already exists a market of 1 million standalones, which I'm guessing they'll be creeping up on (if not surpassing) by the time CES rolls around.