While I already addressed this possibility in my post about Paramount being the latest to jump from the HD-DVD ship, I felt a new post was in order for all these rumors going back and forth about Paramount – which of course came out today and said it was still supporting HD-DVD. Think about it – Paramount currently ONLY has HD-DVDs on the market (unlike the other recent Blu-ray defector, Warner Brothers, which has both formats on the market), would it make any sense for them to announce they were ceasing to support these discs months before they are able to get the new format in stores on a massive scale? No.

We already know that Warner Brothers isn’t technically pulling out of HD-DVD until May 2008, and it’s certainly possibly that Paramount would be looking at the same early-summer timeframe for a switch. Aside from the production issues, who knows, there could well be terms in their opt-out clause requiring that they give a few months notice to HD-DVD before such a move. While it would be nice for them to let the consumer know what they are going to do in a few months, it would also mean basically no next-gen movie sales for possibly 6 months.

While it’s certainly not impossible that Paramount would stick with HD-DVD it seems pretty unlikely given that their contract had a specific out clause in case Warners went to Blu-ray (which of course happened). So unless Toshiba and Microsoft decided to pony up a lot more money (which it didn’t appear Bill Gates was ready to do given his basic vote of no confidence for HD-DVD the other day), I cannot see why Paramount would stay with HD-DVD, they are just prolonging the inevitable and holding up the rest of the industry with them.