Joe Duck

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CES Press Conference Schedule

Posted on January 5, 2008 by JoeDuck

Check www.CESWeb.org for official CES information. Here’s a link to the Press Conference roundup for CES. It’s really going to be interesting to see how the Blu-Ray buzz shakes out. SONY must be thrilled to have their standard come into widespread adoption, and look more like they’ll “win” the high stakes battle for the DVD market. Likewise the HD-DVD folks must really be devastated by the trends away from that technology. Hmmm – am I remembering correctly that it was SONY that lost the betamax vs VCR battle almost a generation ago? If so, maybe they learned from that how to win this one?

Warner feeling Blu-Ray and maybe pocketing $500,000,000

Posted on January 4, 2008 by JoeDuck

Warner Entertainment decided today to go exclusively blu-ray disk and drop the HD DVD format altogether. They’d been working with both standards, and this has sent a shock wave – maybe a deadly shock – to the HD DVD standard pioneered by Toshiba. Blu-ray is the standard developed largely by SONY.

And so we’ve got huge CES News even before the conference starts tomorrow (Sat for Press, Sun for Gates Keynote). The HD-DVD consotium has cancelled it’s press briefing at CES and is probably scrambling to figure out what hit them. Rumors suggest it was a 500 million payoff to Warner that got them to “see the light” of the blu-ray format, though it was a superior format by most technical standards. Unfortunately the players tend to cost more, thus we may see better quality at higher costs.

Engadget has more