Sony bigwig says format war is stuck in a rut

New York (NY) – Sony chief executive Sir Howard Stringer gave surprising comments about the situation about the ongoing high-definition format war between Sony’s Blu-ray and Toshiba’s HD DVD technology. Sony was winning, he said - until Paramount switched sides.

In a conversation with the Associated Press, Stringer described the competition with HD DVD as “difficult fight” that has put the two formats into a “stalemate” situation.

Blu-ray has been believed to have had the edge over HD DVD for the greater part of this year, mainly because of its Playstation 3 console, which aggressively pushed Blu-ray playback capability into the consumer market. Toshiba has been fighting the battle mainly with family room players that are substantially cheaper than Blu-ray players and recently even broke the $100 barrier.

As so often, price may not be the only decisive factor in this battle. Stringer indicated that a change in content availability may have created a rather unfortunate balance in the market, at least for those of us who had hoped for a quick ending of the battle : "We were trying to win on the merits, which we were doing for a while," he told AP, "until Paramount switched sides."

Interestingly, Stringer also played down the significance of the format war, noting that in the end it was all about “prestige.” He told AP that believed there was an opportunity of "uniting the two camps under one format before he became CEO, and he wishes he could travel back in time to make that happen."