While nothing is official just yet, many people are already beginning to write off HD DVD and declare Blu-ray the winner. To help support that fact, Stephen Pope, Chief Global Market Strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald Europe, got a chance recently to sit down with CNN to discuss the current state of the Blu-ray vs HD DVD war.
Pope started out by revealing that Walmart will soon only carry Blu-ray players in their stores, “Walmart said physically in our stores, we’re only going to sell Blu-ray players. You can get the high definition player [HD DVD] if you shop online with Walmart, but if it’s in the store, just Blu-ray.”
Later he was asked if it was just because of the recent Blu-ray success, and if it really meant that it is the better system? Pope responded with, “I think it probably is this time around, in Sony’s favor. The sales have come through with the PS3 which has a Blu-ray player and that has really taken off because they’ve made a smaller capacity model which is more price affordable”
As for how this will effect Sony from a financial standpoint, he commented, “I think you’ll start to see now that the money will begin to roll in towards Sony because people have now seen that there is a definitive decision….the balance has heavily tipped towards Sony favor.”
He was then asked what would Toshiba do now, he had this to say, “I think what you’ll eventually see is that Toshiba will have to realize that as good as the technology is, it is, is not going to be the winner this time around, and they’re going to have to shelve it and eat humble pie and probably under franchise manufacture their own version of blu-ray players.”
Stephen Pope also said that the Blu-ray market will eventually become a 20 billion dollar market, almost triple the value of DVD.