Look out Blockbuster because online rental giant Netflix has just released its first quarterly figures. Profits of $13.4 million on a healthy revenue of $326 million chart a 36 per cent rise in fortunes from this time last year and, with subscriber numbers rising, the company’s strengths look set to weather the download storm to come this year. With Microsoft’s Xbox Marketplace garnering strength, Apple’s iTunes Store growing massively and Sony’s recent promise of on-demand movies on the PlayStation 3, Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings released this HD-orientated statement regarding the company’s battle plan. “Because of the higher cost of Blu-ray and the consumer expectations around high-def content, we are planning on implementing a modest monthly premium for access to Blu-ray sometime this year.”

So Netflix has sussed out its competition early and recognised Blu-ray ownership/rental is no longer a niche. Here’s hoping for a ‘premium’ Blu-ray price from the rental service.

Fox Home Entertainment and MGM Home Entertainment are bringing some classic war titles to Blu-ray. The Battle Of Britain and A Bridge Too Far are set for the format courtesy of MGM, while Fox is launching a counterattack with The Longest Day, Patton and The Sand Pebbles. All titles will come in widescreen with 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, and additional extras.

I started to watch Cloverfield the other day, but after 30 minutes my girlfriend asked me to switch it off. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy the opening third of the post-modern monster movie, more that the handheld Blair Witch-style camera work was so jarring that she was suffering from motion sickness. As a gamer I’m used to the first-person perspective of many a shooter, but I have to admit I was rather relieved when we stopped the DVD – my eyes felt like they had been through the wringer just making sense of the constantly moving images. It got me thinking, would I have coped in the cinema? Camcorder footage on a 20-foot-high screen is not a good combination, and even the film’s producer, JJ Abrams, was quoted recently saying that he thought Cloverfield was a rarity in that he think it actually works better on the small screen.There may be some connotations for the future of HD. Will the effects of eyestrain and motion sickness be amplified in HD when Cloverfield hits Blu-ray? With the emergence of stereoscopic (3D) filming, will we find it harder to make sense of images that fool our brains to represent reality more accurately? Maybe it’s down to filming techniques, although static cameras are rare in this age of action blockbusters and CGI. The biggest indicator that our eyes may need to adapt to catch up with technology is the Ultra Definition system currently being developed in Japan – it’s in the experimental stage, but the 450-inch screen can cover a wall and induce motion sickness whatever you’re watching. With any luck, when we’re all watching our home-cinema walls in 20 years’ time, Cloverfield 7 will be less jerky…

First Pan’s Labyrinth and now The Orphanage; creeping onto HD with superb Blu-ray releases, are these contemporary world-cinema gems setting a precedent? One would hope.With Bergman’s The Seventh Seal receiving a faithful transfer in a recent Blu-ray outing, seasoned film aficionados out there (myself included) are suffering from a distinct lack of HD culture. Italian neorealism powerhouses such as Rome, Open City, the French New Wave chic of Breathless and the sword-waving classicism of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo – will all these feature on a Blu Disc in the near future? Possibly. With world and left-field cinema distributor Tartan sporting a new Blu release slate – headed by Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park – expect to see us going all Mark Kermode in the not-so-distant future with highbrow reviews of some of cinema’s finest.Catch our reviews of both Paranoid Park and The Orphanage in Issue 7 of HD Review, set to hit shelves 5 June.

Welcome to the brand spanking new HD Review blog, which we’ll be using to dispense pearls of high-def wisdom to you all. We’ll still be active on the forums so, as always, feel free to give us a shout there (www.hdreviewmag.com/forum) with your letters, ideas, feedback, questions and… err, anything else you might think of related to all that is high-definition entertainment. For those of you not sure what this HD is all about, checkout www.vimeo.com/hd and take a gander at some superb user videos streamed at 1,280 x 720 – for all intents and purposes it’s the high-def version of YouTube.Cheers,Tom