Blu-ray heads for the gulag
 

Sony boss tries to sound upbeat, fails

SONY BOSS Howard Stringer, reckons that the Blu-ray disc format the company has developed as the successor to the DVD is losing ground to the Toshiba and Microsoft-backed HD DVD. Players for HD DVD are currently selling for half the price of Blu-ray ones in the US.

Back in August, HD DVD got a vote of confidence from Paramount when the movie giant announced it would not be releasing its high definition catalogue on Blu-ray.

"We were trying to win on the merits, which we were doing for a while, until Paramount changed sides," Stringer told AP.

In a rather unconvincing statement, the Sony CEO maintains that it doesn't really matter if Blu-ray follows Betamax on the train to the gulag:

"It doesn't mean as much as all that," he sobbed, adding that he believed there had once been a chance of bringing the two rival technologies together in a single format before he became CEO and he 'wishes he could travel back in time to make that happen'.

The INQuirer