A few other sites reported a little blurb last week from Sony CEO Howard Stringer, where he said in an interview there was a “stalemate” in the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD hi-def format war. Obviously, the CEO of the biggest Blu-Ray backer saying a word like “stalemate” could cause a bit of controversy and/or confusion. Well, The Digital Bits was able to come across an excerpt of that interview which related to the format war, and it appears the “stalemate” quote wasn’t quite the waving-the-white-flag word everyone thought it was.
“We have a more expensive version, as Sony tends to, and Toshiba has a cheaper version, which seems to keep getting cheaper. I believe it has slowed down the progress of high definition packaged goods. Oddly, the studios kind of liked it for a while. They were able to leverage one of us against each other. But in the end, it’s counterproductive. We have a sort of stalemate at the moment. As you know, they had fewer studios, but then they paid a lot of money for Paramount. So we have four studios and they have two or three studios. It’s a difficult… it’s a difficult fight. There was a chance to integrate it before I became CEO. This is something I inherited. And I don’t know what broke down. I wish I could go back there, because I heard it was all about saving face and losing face, and all the rest of it.”
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CLICK HERE to read the full excerpt of that interview.
