We attended a conference session by Ken Graffeo, co-chairman of the European HD-DVD Promotional Group, at last week’s IFA show in Berlin.
He refused to admit there was a format war with Blu-ray, preferring instead to call it a price war and commenting that there would be a sub-£200 HD-DVD player by early next year (the Venturer SHD 7000) – apparently DVD players took four years to drop to that price.
Then there was plenty of talk of the latest HD-DVD titles due out this year including all five Harry Potter films, Blade Runner and Heroes – and claims that three quarters of Europe’s independent filmmakers are releasing titles in HD-DVD.
Graffeo also spoke of the increasingly sophisticated online interactivity supported by HD-DVD and how up to 300 extra features could be included on a single disc.
Paramount vice president Chris Santo also made a short appearance to remind everyone that Paramount is now exclusively backing HD-DVD and ‘will be releasing Transformers on the format shortly’.
And finally, Oliver Van Wynendaele, general manager of HD-DVD at Toshiba, spoke of how a recent promotion of three five discs with the purchase of the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive had dramatically increased sales in the US.
As well as the Xbox, there are now nine CE manufacturers and 12 PC manufacturers producing hardware for HD-DVD with 1600+ titles available.
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