Blu Ray Discs

Netflix flexed its muscle Monday, saying it would raise prices about 20% for subscribers who rent Blu-ray movie discs. The movie service said the higher rates would allow it to stock more copies of the high-definition discs to keep pace with demand. The rate change, which takes effect April 27, will add $4 to the $17 monthly fee paid by subscribers who rent three movies at a time. Customers who rent standard DVDs will not be affected.

Had pundits bet on the HD DVD camp folding its hand in Las Vegas, they would have lost their shirts. None of the corporate giants that back the next-generation DVD format have jumped ship at the Consumer Electronics Show here. But the huge momentum shift toward the Blu-ray format has at least one studio strongly considering a switch. Warner Bros.'

Consumer electronics maker Toshiba Corp. said Monday that it was slashing prices of its HD DVD format players by 40% to 50% as major Hollywood studios move to embrace Sony Corp.'s Blu-ray format for high-definition DVDs. Toshiba America Consumer Products said it cut prices of its HD DVD players effective Jan. 13 to boost market adoption of its next-generation DVD players by mainstream consumers after what it said was a successful fourth quarter in unit sales.

This year Blu-ray won the bitterly fought high-definition disc war when rival HD-DVD gave up. To celebrate the victory, which left it with no real rivals in the high-def realm, Blu-ray did what most monopolies do: raise prices. "In the middle of the format wars, you had Sony and Samsung Blu-ray players on special for $299," said Paul Erickson, an analyst at DisplaySearch. "After the war was over, it went to $399." But no more.

The first wave of Criterion Collection Blu-ray discs was initially slated for October, then pushed out to November, then pushed out again to this week. For a while, home video forums were abuzz with the rumor that Criterion would never release the discs at all. The reason? Criterion's art-house product wouldn't appeal to "the PlayStation 3 crowd" anyway.

Video rental giant Blockbuster Inc. said Monday that it would expand the availability of Blu-ray DVDs to more stores, saying the high-definition discs had proved more popular than the rival HD DVD format. Advocates of the Blu-ray format hailed the decision by the nation's largest video rental chain as evidence of its gathering momentum. Others, however, cautioned that it was too soon to declare a winner in the war to decide the winning format for next-generation DVDs.

Target Corp., the nation's second-largest retailer, will start selling a Sony Corp. Blu-ray high-definition DVD player during the holiday shopping period and feature the player along with Blu-ray discs in store displays, dealing a potential blow to the rival HD DVD format.

The format war over next-generation DVDs appeared to have a clear winner, but the picture just got fuzzier. Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. said Monday that they would offer movies exclusively in the HD DVD format rather than in that of the better-selling Blu-ray -- a surprise move that complicates the technology battle that Blu-ray had been clearly winning.

Blu-ray DVD titles outsold rival HD-DVD titles by almost 2 to 1 in the first nine months of the year, but analysts expect additional HD-DVD support and new hit releases to transform the high-definition DVD battle in the fourth quarter. Home Media Research, a division of Home Media Magazine, said U.S. sales of Blu-ray discs, using a Sony Corp.-backed technology, totaled 2.6 million units from Jan. 1 through Sept 30, versus 1.4 million HD-DVD discs sold. HD-DVD was developed by Toshiba Corp.

Bill Hunt is a self-admitted "early adopter," a polite term for a geek who has to be the first guy on the block with the latest and greatest gadgets. Walk through his front door in Irvine, and you come into a home theater that is a shrine to DVDs. An LCD projector on the ceiling beams movies onto his 110-inch screen. So it comes as no surprise that Hunt, 38, was one of the first to dive into Blu-ray, a long-awaited, high-definition step up from DVDs.