Blu-ray has officially launched in Australia, receiving support from 20 Australian companies, including the retail giant JB Hi-Fi, according to iTWire. As seven Hollywood leading studios and over 170 global companies back the Blu-ray format, JB Hi-Fi believes Blu-ray will be the leading format and has decided to only stock Blu-ray products. The retail chain has no interest in stocking any HD DVD products.
Sony has already declared victory on the format war a couple of times with the most recent announcement based on the January sales figures. The event in Sydney showed off a range of Blu-ray players, recorders, PC drives, recordable Blu-ray discs, software and over 70 Blu-ray titles and was also used to promote the Australian Blu-ray website (www.blurayaustralia.com.au). So far, Australia has suffered from slow digital TV sales, so the launch of Blu-ray may help retailers sell more HDTV sets, at least to those who can afford the equipment.
With Blu-ray just launching in Australia and only at its early stages yet, the more serious breaking of AACS allowing the ripping of all currently released Blu-ray & HD DVD titles comes at a bad time for the studios. It will also be interesting to see how well Blu-ray's additional BD+ software layer copy protection tackles this assuming there is no way to recover from the AACS disaster.
