By now, everyone knows that Paramount has announced that it is dropping Blu-Ray support in favour of exclusively supporting HD-DVD. The reaction has generally been one of surprise – understandable, as no-one really saw this coming, particularly given the sales advantage that Blu-Ray has enjoyed over HD-DVD.

While one can argue back and forth over why Paramount/Dreamworks decided to do this – whether a rumoured $150 million incentive or simply higher profit margins – their decision will only have one result: slowing the uptake of hi-def discs and slowing sales overall. By adding further confusion to the marketplace, Paramount has only scattered sales of HD discs, preventing the buildup of any sort of critical mass. This ‘defection’ will add at least another year to the poorly named ‘format war’ (wouldn’t ‘format bitchslap-fest’ be more appropriate?), if not longer, and will do nothing to spur uptake or sales. If it meant more movies were available to more people, I wouldn’t be so annoyed; but this move means that the opposite is true.

And while I don’t buy the idea that downloads will surpass physical formats – at least until it takes less than five minutes to download a full film – they are increasingly looking like the better option: if your PC doesn’t support the file format, just go download the codec. ‘Cause just when you thought this format war couldn’t get any more like a soap opera…

[Btw, the image in this post comes from Anyworld]