CES 2007: Blu-ray Association declares premature victory

The Blu-ray Disc Association announced at its CES press conference that it is already victorious in the high-definition format war.

Lining up Hollywood film executives from Sony, Warner and Fox Pictures, chair of the US Promotions committee, Andy Parsons, cited the format’s alleged “content advantage”.

With 25 companies now having released Blu-ray products and around 170 film and audio titles announced, Blu-ray media sales outstripped rival HD DVD discs for the first time in December. That’s in subtle contrast to Microsoft’s assertion on Sunday that HD DVD was the best-selling high definition format of 2006 as a whole.

Parsons also called the inclusion of Blu-ray in Sony’s PlayStation 3 a “killer blow” for its rival, with over a million units of the games console now sold – a slap in the face for Microsoft’s recently announced HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 gaming console. The panel stopped just short of saying that HD DVD would disappear altogether by 2010.

This comes in the context of two more significant announcements at this year’s show – LG’s dual-format drive and Warner’s hybrid disc format, which combines both HD DVD and Blu-ray content on a single disc.

The panel played down the idea that either of these was a threat to Blu-ray’s continued sales, but pulled back from dismissing them entirely – both LG and Warner are fully paid-up members of the association.