A fire alarm yesterday afternoon saw me flee PC World towers. One outside, I found it politic to put Meyers Park between me and the potential fire, and soon found myself in Real Groovy Records. The cavernous Groovy wisely devotes the front of its store to DVDs these days. And smack bang at the front is a modest selection of titles (balanced about 50/50) in the two rival high definition DVD formats, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

The small number makes me think most people are too risk-averse to choose between a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player now, or don't want to shell out more for a combo player that handles both formats. The format war poses a dilemma to retailers, too - though you can no longer count the US iteration of the Blockbuster chain as one of the fence sitters.

Today, The Wall Street Journal announces, 1450 Blockbuster's US stores will hiff out HD-DVD and go Blu-Ray only. The Journal calls it a "major blow" for HD-DVD (although not fatal; Blockbuster will still rent HD-DVD titles online and in 250 stores).

A Blockbuster vice president said 70% of customers had been choosing Blu-Ray rentals. Partly it's being driven by sales of Sony's PlayStation3 (which includes a Blu-Ray drive; HD-DVD is an optional add-on for Microsoft's Xbox 360). And partly because only one movie studio (Universal) is releasing titles in HD-DVD only, while the others either support both formats or are Blu-Ray only.

I called Blockbuster's NZ head office, which said the chain doesn't take sides in the religious war here. Individual store managers and franchise owners can order whatever discs, in whatever format they like.