Warner Bros. screwing everything up

Warner Bros. screwing everything up

I’m not going to comment on the rumors of Warner’s future exclusivity plans, I’ll leave that up to the fanboys. What I do want to comment on is the recent screw ups Warner has been doing.

It started with the release of Harry Potter gift set on Blu-ray which included one HD DVD in place of the Blu-ray version. What an awkward mistake that was. The disc was even labeled as HD DVD. This was followed with the Blade Runner 5-disc set shipping with two duplicate discs labeled differently. And finally (for now), Terminator 3 is found to have an encoding error on the disc. There are two copies of the movie, one is a PiP version, and the movie is in 1080i and the PiP is in 1080p.

Oops. This is a big problem to have on such high-profile releases in the course of one month’s time. At least two of the errors can possibly be attributed to the replication centers (but who runs HD DVD and Blu-ray in the same facility?), but the Terminator 3 issue is certainly a mastering err.

I’ve seen several people say things like, “It would be better for Warner to drop Blu-ray than to piss off more customers,” but these are HD DVD fanboys pretending to be pissed off. It’s an interesting phenomenon we find with fanboys, they hate their competitor but are entirely offended when their competitor makes mistakes like it affected them personally.

But there is only a level of patience some consumers have, so Warner really needs to get their act together. You can’t have a problem like this every week and think nothing ill will manifest. At the least, people will hold off buying a title until they hear it’s all right.