Sony’s $400 Million Hit Man
The next-generation DVD format war was a costly one–for Sony (SNE). In addition to the untold funds the company spent on pro-Blu-ray propaganda, it also reportedly spent quite a bit to buy the allegiances of Hollywood.
The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that Sony paid Warner Bros. as much as $400 million to throw its support behind Blu-ray and abandon HD-DVD. An interesting little footnote to the DVD format war, since Warner’s decision all but sealed HD DVD’s fate.
So it was a reported $400 million well spent, then. For the time being, anyway. “People are saying Blu-ray won the war but who cares,” Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said last year. “The war is over physical distribution versus electrical distribution, and Blu-ray and HD lost that. In this, flash memory and hard drives are on the same side. The war is over and the physical guys lost.”
Comments
Why, oh why is “today” obsolete and the day after tommorrow the only day to live for???
I still use and enjoy DVDs and have not even gotten into use BDs. And yet you want to kill them and go straight to downloads. You know the things that you cannot take with you!!
I may be a bit old fashioned, but I will live life one day and one technology at a time. Thank you.
Maybe one day Netflix will actually deliver to me a BD version of my movie. Who knows.
Posted by elder norm at February 24th, 2008 at 8:39 am“The Toronto Globe and Mail reports that Sony paid Warner Bros. as much as $400 million to throw its support behind Blu-ray and abandon HD-DVD.”
A more accurate report would say “After Warner defected to Blu-Ray, some HD-DVD blog somewhere suggested that Sony could have paid Warner $400m for the privilege. The blog later deleted that claim, but not before it was picked up by Engadget, echoed through the blogosphere, and finally reached the mainstream media to be reported as assumed fact.
“Warner’s only on-the-record reaction to this claim was along the lines of: ‘We’re a 60Bn company. You think our HD strategy for the next ten years is worth those peanuts?’”
Not quite as punchy a story, though.
Toshiba and Sony were both throwing money around to get allies in the format war, but the $400m figure is pure invention, and the idea that it may have had more effect on the outcome than, say , the fact that Blu-Ray discs have been consistently out-selling HD-DVD for the last year, is a little ludicrous.
Meanwhile, all Sony’s bought is a few years grace before downloadable HD video starts having the same effect on the video market as downloadable music is having on CDs, and ten years before Blu-Ray is a footnote in Wikipedia.
Posted by Charles Miller at February 24th, 2008 at 2:39 pm