Don Eklund, executive vice president of advanced technologies at Sony, stated in a recent interview:
“We would love to have Toshiba and Microsoft on board.[…] Toshiba can’t keep dropping prices much more. It maybe a strategy for fighting a format war, but for us it has to be profitable."
Up till now the Blu-ray camp has been more successful in pushing its movies on the market. It may appear they managed to do it in spite of the high price of the players (significantly higher when compared to a HD DVD machine).
However, they success lies mostly with the release of the PlayStation 3, which can be safely tagged as the cheapest Blu-ray player available. Had Microsoft managed to pack an HD DVD player onto their Xbox 360 console it’s quite certain that the current hostilities would’ve taken a different turn and Sony would be the ones asked to join the HD DVD side.
In the mean side, neither side appears to gain some significant ground and customers still take their time waiting to see a clear winner. Paramount’s and DreamWorks’ decision to go HD DVD only should’ve been seen as a boost for Microsoft and Toshiba, but the amount of money offered to the two companies for the switch made the move look more like the desperate maneuver of the losing side.
It would be ironic to see that a new format emerges in a few years and sweeps the current competition aside.