Seagate CEO says Blu-ray or HD DVD victory not important

Rich Fiscus
13 Jan 2008 0:55

Despite the apparent coup for Blu-ray in convincing Warner Bros. to join their side shortly before this year's CES conference, Seagate Technology CEO Bill Watkins is confident it won't have any impact on the on-going format war for HD dominance. That's not because he believes HD DVD will take the crown, but rather because he's convinced that the real winner will be electronic distribution rather than physical discs.
"People are saying Blu-ray won the war but who cares? The war is over physical distribution versus electrical distribution, and Blu-ray and HD lost that," he said during a breakfast meeting at the Consumer Electronics Show here this week. "In this, flash memory and hard drives are on the same side. The war is over and the physical guys lost."
In addition to talk of devices for storing video from different sources, which of course is a job for either flash memory or hard drives, he also mentioned that electronic distribution also creates the need for backups of all the data to be broadcast.
So what if the studios simply decide not to embrace the new distribution model? According to Watkins it will be their loss. He says that if no official Channel exists to get video to homes people will take whatever they can find on the internet. "They will watch lousy content if it is easy to do," he said.
Source: CNet