Now the question is: Did Blu-Ray "win" or did they bribe the judges?
Link to 1st article
What remains a mystery is just how big a push Warner needed to pick sides. Analysts say Sony only prevailed following a heated bidding war against Toshiba, with the reward reaching as much as $400-million (U.S.). Neither side has confirmed the size of any bids or payments.
It seems however that the other side did start the bribing first.
Link to 2nd article
It has emerged that Paramount is to be paid for producing content exclusively for the HD-DVD format.
A report in the New York Times, quoting two executives close to the deal, said that the payment includes a bonus of $150m in a combination of cash and promotional guarantees for films.
I thought that this paying customers not to use a competitors product was illegal? Anti trust and all that?
it is, but when you have 2 industrial giants doing it against each other in what is really a two way competition it kind of balances out. I imagine that if one of the competitors was a smaller competition that was unable to match the bribes there would have been some sort of anti-trust complaint. A better case for an anti-trust violation might be found in sony's attempt to tie blueray to the playstation 3 which I believe was sold at a loss of $200 per console. This can be seen as an attempt to use sony's earlier dominance in the video game console industry to force adaption of bluray much as microsoft used its dominance in operating systems to force adoption of internet explorer. The difference is, that the PS3 was overpriced, and had lackluster sales.
Topic: Blu-Ray wins! (Read 5060 times)