HD-DVD Suffers More Losses

A few announcements today make HD-DVD a bigger looser than it already was at this point. Netflix announced that they would go with Blu-ray exclusively and phase out their HD-DVDs and then Best Buy announced they would be pushing Blu-ray over HD-DVD, but stopped short of going exclusive.
Lots of message boards seem filled with people who think Blu-ray won because of Sony’s PS3, but I don’t think that is the case, as most PS3 owners apparently don’t even know they can play Blu-ray movies on it, or don’t care. I think Blu-ray won as it offered the broader studio support, broader hardware support, and is a technically superior format it terms of bit rate and capacity. Unfortunately for the early adopters, the specification wasn’t fully finished when the first generation or two of players were released, though all future players should be upgradeable. Hopefully Toshiba will concede soon and focus instead on other issues, if not them, hopefully Paramount/Dreamworks will stop their exclusive deals soon and go back to format neutral if not Blu-ray exclusive and force the issue with Toshiba’s help or not.