Pioneer VP on Blu-ray and the Format War ™
August 5, 2006
What’s Pioneer think of our current quagmire? Let’s go direct to the source with Andy Parsons, Senior Vice President for Pioneer and the Blu-ray Disc Association Chair…
A lot of the press coverage that’s been coming out that’s talking about Blu-ray versus HD DVD has been characterized as neck-and-neck battle. I understand a lot of people are looking at the initial products that have been shipping as representative of the formats. One of the things we want to communicate is that we’re just at the very beginning of this whole thing.
We’re just beginning to get products on the market from a variety of companies. Titles are now beginning to appear. Warner Bros. just shipped their first Blu-ray titles yesterday (Aug. 1, 2006), which is great. It means now that we have three studios actually shipping titles now. But one of the things that we really want to communicate is that we also have a number of other companies planning to ship products throughout the rest of this calendar year, which means less than five months. Companies like my own (Pioneer), Panasonic, Sony, and Philips will also be releasing consumer-electronics players, as well as Sony’s plans to introduce PlayStation 3 in November.
A lot of noise had been made about why Blu-ray players are more expensive versus HD DVD. We think that as time goes by and as more companies are competing against each other, that we should see a pretty rapid change in that area. The other thing that we like to point out is that we have seven studios in the Blu-ray Disc Association that are supporting the format with content that they are already shipping, or that we expect will be shipping sometime in the near future, so because we have seven studios versus the other format’s three studios, we think that that’s a pretty fundamental advantage. We think that when consumers start looking at the larger array of content that they’ll be able to buy and Blu-ray versus HD DVD, that will certainly make help it clear which of the formats is likely to prevail.
Source: Consumer Electronics
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