Blu-ray, HD DVD Camps Wooing Warners

Here's a scenario that "Survivor" fans know well: two equally matched voting blocks stuck in a stalemate, with a single, undecided player suddenly the key to the game. Both sides wine and dine the holdout, hoping to break the tie. The two tribes are Blu-ray and HD DVD. The holdout? Warner Brothers, the last major movie studio still making HD discs in both formats. And according to BusinessWeek, the wooing has reached a fever pitch.

The news magazine reports that representative from both camps are reaching out—way out—to Warner Brothers, with Toshiba HD DVD business lead Yoshihide Fujii making three trips to the United States in recent months, while Sony CEO and Blu-ray proponent Sir Howard Stringer has been personally making his case to top execs at Time Warner, the parent company of Warner Brothers.

The stakes are high for the warring HD camps. Blu-ray has exclusive deals with Disney, Sony (natch, given Sony's massive stake in Blu-ray), Fox, and MGM, while HD DVD has Universal, Paramount, and DreamWorks. The HD DVD group lured Paramount and DreamsWorks (which had previously supported both formats) earlier this year, and Sony clearly hopes to strike back by getting Warners to go Blu-ray-only.

The BusinessWeek story argues that Blu-ray may have the edge in the wooing, for a couple of reasons: It has a base of 2.7 million players (including Blu-ray-equipped PlayStation 3 consoles) in the United States, compared to 750,000 for HD DVD (including Xbox 360 add-on HD drives), and Blu-ray discs have been outselling HD DVD at a two-to-one ratio in recent weeks. All true...although cheaper HD DVD stand-alone players easily won the Black Friday sales way with a 62 percent market share, compared to just 37 percent for Blu-ray.

So, let's say Warners did jump to one camp or the other come next month, when the curtain rises on CES in Vegas. Would such a move be a knockout blow for the loser? I doubt it. Both camps have serious backing—Toshiba, Unversal, and Microsoft all have stakes in HD DVD, with Sony the big muscle on the Blu-ray side—and each side still has studio exclusives locked in (Paramount, which distributes hits like "Transformers," is signed with HD DVD until about 2009, and Disney, with franchises like "Pirates of the Caribbean," is cozy with Blu-ray). I think this war has a good 12 months (or more) to go, regardless of what Warners does.

That said, if Warner Brothers does go ahead and choose a side, it'll be a blow for those of us who already have HD players of one format for another (Warners has some big movies in its catalog...you've heard of "The Matrix" and "Batman," right?), although it'll make pricey but slowly-getting-cheaper dual-format HD decks that much more attractive.

What do you think? Will Warners choose a side? Would that matter to you if you're shopping for an HD disc player?

Related:
Next-Gen DVDs: Advantage, Sony [BusinessWeek, via High-Def Digest]