Lieberfarb: PS3's Blu-Ray Uses Unorthodox Competition

Former Warner Home Video President and current Microsoft consultant Warren Lieberfarb on Wednesday accused Sony of using unorthodox war tactics in their plans to bring the blu-ray media format to market. "If you ever read 'The Art of War,' you will see all of Sony's moves, including taking all its enemies in the same tent and then leaving them empty-handed, are things that they have done historically," Lieberfarb said during a keynote at Wednesday's Perspectives in European Video conference. Lieberfarb argued that the home video industry is being sucked into the next-generation console war between the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, against their wills. "The subplot here is that if I put Blu-ray in PlayStation and I don't license it to Microsoft for Xbox and I get all the studios to only publish in PlayStation, I'll beat Microsoft in the next-generation games space," he said. "What we've been sucked into is PlayStation versus Xbox." "They did the same thing to Matsushita and Betamax, they did the same thing to Matsushita on compact disc, they did the same thing to Matsushita on the digital video camcorder," said Lieberfarb. "At their core, they compete in some kind of samurai way that I consider closer to kabuki, which I have never understood. I know it isn't the way we compete in the West." Blu-Ray is the name of Sony's proprietary next-gen media format, which will be featured in their upcoming PlayStation 3 console. Major home video studios already signed on to release film in the format include Universal, Paramount, and Lions Gate.