Woolworths first to drop HD DVD from stores
updated 12:10 pm EST, Mon January 28, 2008
Woolworths Drops HD DVD
British store chain Woolworths today revealed that it will switch exclusively to selling Blu-ray for its movie discs, becoming the first large-scale retailer to drop HD DVD entirely from its shelves. The decision comes after holiday sales where Blu-ray titles outsold HD DVD by a factor of ten to one at the UK chain and is credited largely to the Sony PlayStation 3, which Woolworths says gives Blu-ray a major advantage in terms of a viewer base. As many as 750,000 homes in the country own at least one device that can play the discs, far eclipsing the statistics for HD DVD, according to the retailer's estimates.
The change takes effect in March and will see all of Woolworth's 820 stores offer at least the top-ranked Blu-ray titles in their stores. Larger outlets are also expected to carry a significant number of extra titles. No American retailers already carrying HD DVD have said they would drop the format themselves, though some chains have said they would shift towards Blu-ray or start offering HD movies solely in that standard after Warner Bros. announced that it would switch to offering movies solely in Blu-ray versions by June.
The HD DVD Promotional Group has already responded to the move and says that it is "disappointed" with Woolworths but denies that the loss of such a major outlet will affect its chances at gaining marketshare. The Promotional Group claims 60 percent of the HD movie market in the UK and a higher attach rate of movies to players but now and in the past has consciously excluded PlayStation 3 sales from its figures. Previously, the organization has claimed Sony's device does not count as it primarily serves as a game system.
Many PC makers outside of Sony and Toshiba, both of whom helped create Blu-ray and HD DVD respectively, are known to be waiting for decisions such as these to help guide their own choices of standards. Many companies have either chosen to withhold drive support entirely (as with Apple) or else have carried the choice of both formats, as with HP's newest systems.
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apple support
Aside from supporting external BluRay drives, we haven't seen any installed BluRay optical drives installed inside even MacPros. I wouldn't bank Apple as a BluRay advocate (aside from the confederation of comapnies on the list) due to its new video rental/purchase model in iTMS.
That being said, i hope they do support installed optical drives for backup if nothing else. Yes, it'd be nice to have time machine always backing up to an external drive, but there are times when you want to hand off a ton of files, for which a BR disc would be useful. Not to mention archiving old files you'll never use except in audit-like cirumstances.
I'd wait until the price of internal BR drives goes down quite a bit before declaring whether Apple will support them as part of THEIR hardware.