If a picture's worth a thousand words, a pie chart has to be worth at least 500. Well, Ken Pierce over at Pixel Perfect Productions has cooked up five pie charts' worth of data on why the HD DVD/Blu-ray war is over--and as James Carville would say, it's all about the content, stupid.
To give credit where credit is due, I first noticed this link in Bill Hunt's "My Two Cents" column on Digital Bits. (Sorry, the item was from a couple of days ago, but I've been on vacation). Says Hunt: "Ken's looked at the biggest films of the last few years and calculated the percentages of those films, by studio grosses, that are available for release on each format. It's called By The Numbers, and you'll find it in Ken's Random Thoughts blog over at the Pixel Perfect Web site."
Pierce goes through the top grossing films of 2005, 2006, 2007 (so far), as well as the top 100 grossing films of all time. For 2007, for example, he says, "Of the top 100 2007 (YTD) films, 47 are from Blu-ray exclusive studios, 14 are HD DVD exclusive studios, 29 are dual-format studios and 10 are not supporting either format currently." The rest of the pies look pretty similar. I don't care who wins, but those charts have to be pretty scary-looking if you're an HD DVD supporter.