For a time, it seemed that Blu-ray was moving towards victory in the HD disc format war. However, the recent Paramount decision to forsake Blu-ray has had the effect of putting HD DVD back in the race, according to Joseph Whip at TVPredictions.com. In addition, no one should be picking sides.

Mr. Whip, who regularly reads the tea-leaves of this format war, took a look at the recent announcements and sales numbers. He made some observations and came to some conclusions. The most notable were:

1. Neither side is winning and neither side is selling well.

2. Consumers have made their decision. The war is being ignored and DVDs look good enough on an HDTV. In addition, HD disc prices are just to high, and the result is a no-brainer for simple DVDs. While a good Blu-ray or HD DVD title release may reach 300,000 in sales, the same DVD will sell many millions.

3. Paramount’s recent decision to drop Blu-ray and go with HD DVD exclusively [for 18 months] has resulted in a movie sales ratio of only 54:46 compared to 70:30 prior to Paramount’s announcement. While the absolute sales numbers are low, its enough to prolong the psychology of the war.

Recent poor communication between the CE companies and the studios have resulted in some discs that won’t play properly. "We are too far into this process to still have these problems," Mr. Whip noted.

Finally, the most notable conclusion was that, given the very similar performance of both formats with VC-1 video and AVC audio codecs, no one should really be picking sides in this prolonged stalemate.