Acer and China Huala side with Blu-ray, ditch HD-DVD
At the IFA Consumer Electronics show, Acer and China Huala Group were happy to announce their allegiance with Sony and Co.
Acer’s announcement to back Blu-ray should present consumer’s with a considerable catalog of desktops and laptops equipped with Blu-ray drives. While the announcement is not a deciding factor, computer manufacturers as a whole will be a significant deciding factor in the war, so the size of Acer, who recently bought Gateway, as a worldwide company will hurt Toshiba’s HD-DVD considerably. Other computer manufacturers supporting Blu-ray include Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo.
China Huala Group’s announcement comes with plans to build a Blu-ray Disc authoring center in China.
With other big companies such as BJ’s Wholesale, Target, and Blockbuster to go exclusively or near exclusively Blu-ray, HD-DVD will face an uphill climb this Holiday Season.
Not one to give us so soon, the HD-DVD camp isn’t throwing in the towel quite yet. Microsoft dropped the price of its HD-DVD add on for the Xbox 360, and Michael Bay, a former Blu-ray fanatic, recently switched his allegiance to HD-DVD.
Although many believe Michael Bay’s decision to promote HD-DVD came as a result of Paramount, the studio behind Transformers, switching as well, one has to wonder what to believe since the man, just 36 hours before, announced on his forum that he would refuse to do Transformers 2 if the Transformers movies were not released on Blu-ray.
Regardless of the little advances each side makes every so often, the war will not end any time soon. Countless companies are still undecided, each with a little bit of power to change the tide. When consumers vote with their wallets this upcoming Holiday Season, perhaps we’ll start to see a majority of the undecided companies head one way or the other.
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