Sony CEO: format war in 'stalemate'

[Agent]

The biggest problem with BR is that it is proprietary and Sony demand a percentage of every disc or player sold.

HD DVD however is almost royalty free and there will be little wasted space.

HD DVD is certainly not "almost royalty free", although licensing of the hardware players is cheaper currently - If you want to see which technology's are licensed, see this.
One of the reasons Bluray come about was due to 6C wanting royalties from HD DVD sales, which could have made it unfair on some of the other company's that were involved.

Furthermore, its not Sony that demands a percentage - Its the Blu-ray consortium, or more specifically, the people who developed the format. They need to make the money back that it cost them in research - hence the need for licensing. If licensing didn't exist, doing R&D for large scale technologies such as Bluray would by difficult

See:
Blu-Ray licensing begins on Monday
DVD 6C PATENT POOL
Welcome to the Blu-ray Disc License Entity -- Home

As for Bluray being "proprietary".....every type of optical media is to some consortium or another, HD DVD is no different to Bluray. Its all about licensing.

[Phillikon]

I have just finished reading the latest results for HD/Blu-ray player sales.
It's a hard one really, HD-DVD has sold loads more "set top" players than Blu-ray however Sony are adding the sales of PS3 in to the mix as a Blu-ray player, this is having the effect of bumping up numbers for Blu-ray over and above HD-DVD
Mind you it probably also has the effect of hiding really bad PS3 sales as well.

I must admit, I am biased, I really don't like the way Sony do business, their actions in the past especially against smaller companies has been detrimental to the free market in my opinion.