Sharp eyed reader pemster noticed while reading yesterday’s article that Channel 9 has moved back to the old nine dot logo on their watermark on HD TV. As pemster suspected, the logo change occurred on SD TV as well.

Here’s the watermark as shown a few days back:

And here is is as of yesterday:

The dots are back.

As a logo, I like the dots. As a watermark, it sucks. All watermarks suck. Why isn’t some government watchdog stepping in and stopping the watermark crap?

I’ve blogged a couple of times now about Australia’s Channel TEN commercial TV network and their TEN HD watermark.

It seems Channel 9 were feeling left out. Not wanting to be outdone by TEN, they’ve updated their 9 HD watermark to follow the trend TEN started. And here it is:

Yep. There is no way that would be annoying. No way.

And here are the three contenders side by side.

Innovation at its best. I’d say 9 win this round. Congratulations guys!

News today that Warner Bros. has decided to release all of its HD movies in Blu-ray exclusively from May this year. This will make 70% of all HD movies released Blu-ray exclusives.

Why did they do this? They want this war over! HD movies don’t sell as well as DVDs, as we all know - but apparently DVD sales are down too as a result of the HD format wars. People are just waiting it out and not buying anything, so the movie studios are losing money.

And this is exactly what I’ve been doing. Normally I buy quite a few DVDs. But I’ve bought nothing over the last 6 months. I’ve got a HD TV now, so I want HD versions of movies. But since I don’t know which format will win, I choose not to buy any movies and spend my money elsewhere. I even pass up cheap DVDs on sale.

Rumour has it that Microsoft has only really been backing HD-DVD to cause confusion, so they can be seen as the saviour with HD downloadable content. Yeah right Microsoft. Let’s see you release downloadable movies in 1080p quality (not the highly compressed 720p you currently sell), then we’ll talk.

As some of you would know, Apple are Blu-ray backers, though currently they don’t ship any computers with Blu-ray drives in them. Maybe that will change at Macworld this year? Perhaps at least a Blu-ray drive option on certain Macs? Come on Steve - hammer another nail in the HD-DVD coffin for us so we can all move on!

I recently wrote about Australian HD TV and the lack of Dolby Digital 5.1 content. At the time I could find only one TV show that had Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.

Since then I’ve found a few more. The list so far is:

• Today
• A Current Affair
• 2 Movies - Tsunami: The Aftermath and Collateral Damage

I’ve also heard reports that McLeod’s Daughters is shown with Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio.

The thing in common with all these shows is the station showing them - Channel Nine. I have yet to see any other Australian station showing content with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Just for comparison, tonight on prime time TV, TEN HD showed Mission Impossible - no Dolby Digital 5.1 audio of course.

So, kudos to Nine for making the effort. Some of your viewers appreciate it.