Ken Graffeo, excutive vice president, HD DVD Strategic Marketing for Universal recently sat down with gadget site Pocket-lint to talk about the the ongoing format war.

When asked if the company has plans to support Sony’s Blu-ray disc format, Graffeo said: “We have no plans to support Blu-ray. We want to be able to market all the great things HD DVD can offer consumers. We couldn’t do this if we split our resources on two formats, hedged our bets and had to avoid over promoting features on one format so we wouldn’t undercut the other format. HD DVD allows us to provide the type of quality and truly next generation experiences we need to get consumers to migrate from DVD.”

Graffeo doesn’t have much faith in Sony’s strategy to push the Blu-ray format by including it with every PS3 as well: “The PS3 is a gaming system first - even Sony will tell you this, and we believe consumers use gaming consoles to play games. Studies show that 70% of gamers don’t even know that their console has a DVD playback option. What’s important is that HD DVD owns the lead in dedicated CE player sales and maintains a 4:1 software attach rate over Blu-ray, meaning people are purchasing four times more HD DVD titles per HD DVD player than Blu-ray. Standalone players for HD DVD will be as low as $199 this holiday shopping season - maintaining HD DVD’s clear cost advantage. The PS3 simply hasn’t been the gamer changer Sony had hoped it would be.”