It is now official, if it wasn’t official before, HD DVD is DEAD. If it weren’t bad enough that Warner Brothers decision to go exclusively Blu-ray weren’t enough of a death blow, Netflix is now going exclusively Blu-ray. Game Over.

I would have rather HD DVD won if for no other reason than I have a sick fascination in watching Sony formats die one after the other. I have heard of being a maverick, but Sony takes it to an extreme. They have storied career of creating competing formats only to see them receive a tepid response from the public, slide into obscurity, and die.

Remember ATRAC? No? That one was Sony’s answer to MP3…a real barnburner! What about Memory Stick? Maybe… That one was Sony’s flash memory product. It was in every Sony camera both still and video, and basically only in those cameras. No one wanted to give Sony a portion of their profits. Sony was also the progenitor of Betamax, a technically better contemporary of the VHS tape that died a legendary death. (Product failures are still measured by this watermark…)

Yes Sony, what a fine history you have of formats that fail. But, in this case, I think you have finally created a winner, and its true herald is Netflix. With Netflix washing its hands of HD DVD, the war is indeed over.

CrunchGear » Archive » HD DVD group calls Netflix Blu-ray decision ‘unfortunate’

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/12/hd-dvd-camp-issues-sad-little-response-to-netflix-best-buy-snub/