No Region Codes for HD-DVD?

MBCook writes "According to Engadget something interesting has come out of the DVD Forum Conference 2005 in Japan. Here is the line from the post we've all been waiting for: 'But one statement from Toshiba Digital Media Networks' Hisashi Yamada was particularly intriguing: "We've gotten a variety of opinions about region controls. Even in the Steering Committee, they are extremely unpopular; we decided to not put them in. HD DVD probably won't contain any region playback controls."' Source: Japanese, English (via Google's Language Tools)."

Comments

Finally

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Does this mean we can import and play the HD-DVDs of movies that have yet to come out in the theatre here in Europe? (without special hardware)

I wonder what the movie industry thinks about this.

ok, I like HD DVD now

[the_2nd_coming]

at least one copy can be made to an electronic format, and no region encoding? sweet!!!

I hope Apple jumps on this because then they could have all they need for a video iPod

Competition may be producing good results

[angryflute]

Looks like the competition between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD may benefit consumers in the end after all. Now let's see what Sony offers the consumer with Blu-Ray to convince us to go with them first.

Re:Whoa.

[Yocto Yotta]

That's probably the collective HD-DVD camp's line of thinking. Then when the standard gain's mass-movement, region lock-in gets slipped back into the standard because of newly founded "concerns" from the content producers. All the pros (of course, aside from the very real cost-, and very arguable format structure- benefit)that the format has going for it suddenly disappear.

Let's hear it for marketing! Yay!

And now again for speculative opinion! Yay!