Warner Home Video's Total HD Blu-ray and HD DVD hybrid discs have been shelved indefinitely. Ron Sanders revealed the news in an interview with twice.com last week.
The Total HD discs consist of a Blu-ray disc and an HD DVD disc glued together back-to-back. They were conceived to alleviate the problem of consumers not venturing into the world of HD for fear of backing the wrong disc format.
The benefit of the hybrid discs is that movie publishers would only need to put out one product instead of stocking shelves with both HD DVD discs and Blu-ray ones.
No Total HD discs
The downside of course is that the hybrid discs are more expensive to make than the individual ones. And no one knows if people would be willing to pay a little extra for them.
The Total HD concept was a solution born out of the ongoing HD DVD and Blu-ray war. Some observers believe that the two HD formats can co-exist together, just as DVD-Audio and SACD do. If so, then surely dual-format players, like LG's BH200, will also make the format war largely irrelevant for consumers.
Sanders told Twice: "We're concerned that as the only one publishing on [Total HD], it would be hard to make it go. We're still looking at it, though. We're still talking to retail, but it's kind of on hold right now."
Read the full interview over at Twice.
