(21 August 2007 3:54 pm)

MUMBAI: Movie buffs could find themselves at the receiving end of the HD and Blu ray format war as Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc have decided to offer movies exclusively in the HD DVD format.

The announcement comes across as surprising since the Blu-ray format has been clearly selling better than HD disks, according to media research reports.

According to Home Media Research research director Judith McCourt, from 1 January through till 12 August, consumers bought 2.1 million Blu-ray discs and 1.1 million HD DVD discs, compared with nearly half a billion standard DVDs.

So what does the announcement hold for the end-user? It means that Warner Bros. Pictures and its sister concern New Line Cinema will be the only Hollywood studios serving both formats. "If you want Transformers and Shrek the Third, you'll need an HD DVD player, but if you want Spider-Man 3 or Pirates 3 you'll need Blu-ray. This substantially prolongs the format war," said an analyst.

Dreamworks Animation chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberg said, "I am very late to this party because I was skeptical about high definition, but what is happening in the marketplace is a game changer."

However films by director Steven Spielberg's films are not included in this and the companies said that they were "not exclusive to either format."

Spielberg, Katzenberg and David Geffen sold their DreamWorks SKG live-action operation to Paramount parent Viacom Inc. last year.

Currently Universal Pictures releases film DVDs exclusively in HD DVD, developed by a consortium headed by Toshiba Corp. Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Co., Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., meanwhile, release titles only in the Sony-developed Blu-ray.

Although lower prices will help spur sales of high-definition movie players, consumers will still hold off because they don't want to be stuck with an obsolete machine that won't be able to play new movies from the winning format a year from now, said analyst Chris Roden.