It really isn't my place to judge what a company chooses to back when it comes to a potential market. I am not even going to pretend that I understand the extreme complexities of making business decisions. However I do understand the simple obvious choice of what makes Paramount choose HDDVD over Blu-ray.

I originally belived Blu-ray to be the winner of the HD format war simply because of it's higher data storage capability. Despite the ability to use better video compressions formats based on the MPEG-4 standard such as Microsoft's VC-1, I believe that the old standard of MPEG-2 with it's higher bit-rate makes for a better picture quality. The ability to have a larger storage gives us the ability to use this higher bit-rate will in the end will result in a higher quality video and the format lasting for longer on the market.

Taking into account the recent sales figures that state that Blu-ray outsells HDDVD two to one would make it the obvious choice for a exclusive format, I find it unlikely that any major production company will knowingly choose the market with the lower sales potential. Paramount says that they believe that the lower price of the HDDVD players will turn around the sales to HDDVD's benefit.

A single fact that must be stated is that when Blu-ray launched the players cost twice as much as the most executive HDDVD player. Now that the prices have fallen it makes the price difference not as significant as before.

This is now where I change into what I really want to talk about.

The HDDVD does have its tech supporters. Namely Microsoft and Intel. However these two mega companies have little to do with the movie industry. However they are huge supporters for the tech community. That is where it gets strange. Unless you own a expensive Toshiba laptop then you do not have a HDDVD RW drive. You can get a HDDVD ROM drive for you desktop but you lack the ability to write to disks. That begs the question of why these tech companies care about HDDVD at all.

For the life of me, I can't tell why Intel backs HDDVD but I know for sure why Microsoft does. Microsoft made it very apparent some time ago that they wanted to pioneer or at least mainstream the purchasing of movies over the Internet. Bill Gates also stated that Blu-ray had a longer potential time on the market then HDDVD does. It is very obvious that Microsoft only backs HDDVD because it will become obsolete well before Blu-ray does because of it's lower data capacity.

HDDVD maxes out at a theoretical three layers totaling forty five gigabytes. Blu-ray has a theoretical maximum of eight layers totaling a two hundred gigabytes. Keep in mind that these are just theoretical numbers, but it is obvious that in five to ten years time they would have long reached the ceiling of HDDVD leaving the next technology to come in and replace it. Microsoft wants it to be it's not yet announced movie download service. If Blu-ray stood in it's way Microsoft would have a hard time succeeding a format that still has a so much life left in it.