HD DVD Is Buried in the Land Down Under

Although the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray battle has really heated up lately, we've mainly talked up until now about what's happening on the major markets, namely the North-American, European and Japanese ones. However, the two formats have, quite obviously, reached the other parts of the world as well. It seems that, at least in Australia, the HD DVD format isn't doing too good (actually, it's not doing so good at all).

Thus, according to an article by Asher Moses for the Sidney Morning Herald, it appears that the two major rental chains operating in Australia, namely Video Ezy and Blockbuster, have decided to pack their bags and move completely into the Blu-ray camp. The reason? The slow deployment of HD DVD, due to an apparent lack of interest for the Australian market by HD DVD supporters, who did not see Australia as an important market compared with the US and Europe.

"Without meaning to be disrespectful, it's probably how they see this territory in terms of their bottom line," Asher Moses quotes Paul Uniacke, managing director of the Franchise Entertainment Group, which owns Video Ezy and Blockbuster in Australia, as saying. He also mentioned that the HD DVD side was quickly "missing the boat".

Furthermore, according to a study by GfK, the number of standalone players (pertaining to both formats) sold in Australia up until now is rather modest (around 2241 Blu-rays and just 609 HD DVD units), and the same trend applies to the number of movie discs sold over the same period. However, on the other hand, over 100,000 PS3's were rolled out, thus seriously boosting the level of popularity enjoyed by Sony's format.

As you were able to see from our various articles on the subject, Blu-ray seems to have gained quite a lot of supporters over the past few months, and HD DVD is really lagging behind, despite its backers' very aggressive pricing campaign for compatible standalone players. And although the final outcome of this conflict is still rather difficult to determine, the signs of Blu-ray's supremacy are becoming increasingly visible on several markets around the world, thus leading us to the unavoidable question: what will HD DVD supporters do in order to counter this trend?

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