The latest in a series of slams against HD DVD, Blu-ray just gained Best Buy’s endorsement on the sales floor. But, Best Buy may be shooting itself in the foot.

Best Buy “will recommend that consumers choose Sony Corp’s Blu-ray high-definition video format,” according to Reuters.

Combine that with Netflix’s decision to exclusively order Blu-ray moving forward and that makes it a rough day for HD DVD.

Best Buy told Reuters it believes consumers prefer a single format and “because we believe that Blu-ray is fast emerging as that single format, we have decided to focus on Blu-ray products.”

That said, Best Buy will continue to offer some HD DVD products moving forward, but there’s no word on breadth of selection or for how long.

Many mainstream consumers enter Best Buy without a strong opinion about which devices to use for digital entertainment so this endorsement could significantly boost sales of Blu-ray products.

Now the question is, how will Toshiba and the other HD DVD supporters respond? Toshiba has cut prices on the its player down below the $150 mark and could potentially cut it again below the $100 mark. At that point it wouldn’t cost much more than a standard DVD player. Then again, a player isn’t worth much without dynamite movies available. Microsoft has also repeatedly cut prices on its Xbox HD DVD player.

Besides the reduction in competition and consumer choice–on some level Best Buy may also be shooting its own foot by pushing one format over another. With two formats in its stores both at different price points, Best Buy is able to target different segments of customers. Theoretically its salespeople could start with a Blu-ray recommendation and move to HD DVD if the customer wasn’t open to the high cost.

Endorsing a single format also slows down the small but quickly growing hybrid player market.

Keeping both formats would require a fair amount of expertise from the sales force and it doesn’t appear Best Buy is interested in the effort and investment resources required to be well versed in Blu-ray and HD DVD.

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Entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 10:21 pm under High Definition Formats.

Read more entries by Matt Jansen.
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