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Toshiba Execs Declare HD DVD Not Dead Yet
Lucas123 writes "HD DVD proponent Toshiba remains defiant that its format will not succumb to the mounting tsunami of support for Blu-ray Discs. Akio Ozaka, head of Toshiba America Consumer Products, said at CES today that he was surprised by Warner's decision." It should also be noted that the HD DVD group has cancelled many of their meetings at CES.
...In-con-CEIV-able.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
So watch out when they release classical operas on HD DVD.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
to follow.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
..the death of HD-DVD right there.
The DVD forum has been a bit of a bully, and while Toshiba made more then ten billion dollars through their involvement, I think a lot of companies are ready to try something else.
Blu-ray isn't the end of the world for them, as Japanese businesses are kinda incestuous and Toshiba has its own set of investments. Toshiba will make plenty of money, just not as much as they did last round.
I'm curious how Paramount deals with this. Does their contract (with MS or Toshiba) have an escape clause?
Anyway, HD DVD is done. Toshi can't be overtly honest about it until they get rid of some inventory. I saw a couple of people returning their HD DVD players, presumably from Christmas, to Target tonight. Are these people picking up PS3s? Probably some are. It's not like HD DVD owners should toss their systems, and I actually think they might be in for a pleasant round of super cheap movies and spare players.
And the Xbox 360 might even be helped by this. Think about it, the XBOX is not quiet enough to play a disc movie, at least for a lot of people. But it's just fine for downloads. Microsoft may ramp up and accelerate their download service now that this war is ending, instead of gaming each company against eachother like fools to slow adoption. Ps2 owners are slow adopted, but in my opinion 360 owners are fast adopters, and the console is more internet oriented. These people are much more likely to download movies, and I think the 360 is going to continue to do very well.
Warner did the right thing, and I'm confident there will be much more progress in HD movies. I think these films look much better than DVD, and while DVDs were much more of a revolution in technology, Blu-ray is a real step up that downloads cannot hope to compete with in the US.
We all knew this was going to end, and most of us realized bluray was going to win out. Warner had no leverage to end Blu-ray, so they used their power very effectively. And may have been planning this out. I expect to see Warner's movies all over Microsoft's system. I bet this was well known to MS, and the announcement the two companies have planned has to do with the 360's downloads.
In short, this is going to work out fine for everybody.
correct me if i'm wrong but isn't blue ray (i refuse to go with the stupid spelling fad) better on a technical level anyway?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Aren't I allowed to hate *both* MS and Sony?
Toshiba should have demanded that the 360 carry an HD-DVD drive standard. The addon carries extra bulk, and if you combine that with the cost of the 360, you might as well have just bought a PS3 instead.
How would they demand that? Microsoft simply does not care about HD-DVD enough to risk tanking it's game console like Sony did (by forcing the price up for something that doesn't actually help games).
I like the part where you complain about fanboyism, and then immediately start going into wild speculation about "divx-like lockdowns and timed rentals", then follow that up with complaints of "selective buyouts" that both sides were doing.
Frankly, I'm just glad the whole thing's over, so that hopefully the burners will start getting more common/cheaper.
I am not a number - I am a free man!
Form both the Toshiba and Microsoft CES keynotes, not a peep of any news that would have helped HD-DVD much even before Warner took out the wind from their sales and the water they were sailing on. Toshiba hardly mentioned HD-DVD at all (focusing on LCD TV's) and Microsoft didn't mention HD-DVD once! What exactly is the magical force that will keep HD-DVD going past this point - with the media generally declaring HD-DVD dead the consumers will believe that as well, and start not buying HD-DVD products and media in droves. There's already a hint Target is dropping HD-DVD (slipped out by a Phillips executive during a CES keynote).
Paramount and Universal will be doubly screwed now until they come to Blu-Ray - no-one will buy HD-DVD titles in any numbers to speak of, and lots of people may shy away from any SD DVD's until those studios move to Blu-Ray and produce an HD title to buy. I know I had stopped buying DVD's for over a year now, thinking that anything I liked enough to buy could wait for on HD.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I work for a museum, and part of my job is to store photographs and news stories from the present day in a safe archive for potential reference in the future. For now, both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are a long way away from attracting our attention as potential archival storage mediums, but all the same I've been concerned by news that Blu-Ray's data layer is on the under-side of the disc, completely exposed save for a lacquer-like coating of some type. That's different from HD-DVD, which follows the DVD in having the data layer actually sandwiched in the middle of the disc between the plastic top and bottom halves. If that's the case, I wonder if Blu-Ray isn't just another small step towards a throw-away future. The pessimist in me also wonders if there isn't an intentional disinterest in protecting that data layer better, because of course if it degrades over time that just means that, in the case of a movie or video game, the owner is just going to have a buy another copy after some period of time. That's just speculation on my part of course, and the media hasn't been around long enough for any meaningful real-world testing to be done (so far as I know). All the same, I can't see Sony and friends really viewing that possibility as a downside, can you?
Full Tilt
Buying a Big Mac isn't obligatory, but when I do I pay tax on it. It still is tax.
Blu-ray comes with a significant price premium -- for both technical and licensing reasons -- over HD-DVD. Add the value of combo discs that you can get for HD-DVD, but not Blu-ray, and the average household either has to upgrade wholesale at once (have fun getting a blu-ray player for the SUV), or buy all media twice.
Blu-ray is a much more expensive proposition for exactly the same end result.
So, the warranty on some HD-DVD players isn't even over yet, and the format is already being called dead, and there probably won't be any new content released after today.
Nice, so, all the people that spent $$$$ on some HD-DVD player or Xbox attachment are going to be mighty pissed off, as they have once again, fallen into what I call the High-Def money pit, where you have to constantly buy some new gizmo because the holders of the DRM willy nilly decide to change things.
How many TVs were sold as HD-ready, only to not be? How many 720p sets or even 1080i sets still don't have an HDMI connection? And let's not even get into Vista Media Center, or any of the other depricated formats that have lead to technological dead-ends and/or having to re-buy the same media all over again (MLB, anyone?)...
If I had been stupid enough to even join in the HD revolution, I'd be pissed off enough to start suing every company that dropped the ball. I'd start with demanding my money back, and when they refused, I'd start throwing lawyers into the mix.
I can't decide who's going to be marching on corporate america first with torches and pitchforks -- the early-adopters of HD, or those screwed out of TV when we switch to digital in Feb of 2009.
Either way there are going to be some demanding their pound of flesh. I just want to sit back and watch the whole thing -- in regular NTSC of course, because regular TV is good enough when you consider the content available.
TTYL
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I know they keep saying that, but aren't BluRay disks still essentially 12 cm polycarbonate disks with a reflective layer and a pitted layer?
Is the process really so different that it's easier to build an entire new plant rather than retool an existing DVD plant?
Harder than HD-DVD I can understand, but assuming BRD has won the format war (especially depressing as consumers haven't really had a say yet), I find it hard to believe DVD plants will basically be gutted and replaced as they phase out and BRD phases in.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Yes, ever so slightly. BUT, it costs more to manufacture
Since many millions more discs have been pressed in Blu-Ray (thanks to PS3 games) the production costs have dropped substantially. And the consumer only sees movie prices which have remained identical between the two formats.
more for the drives
Sony just announced a $200 PC BD-ROM. How much are HD-DVD ROM's again? Scale shows advantage once again.
and it natively supports region locking and other consumer nightmares.
Most titles do not use the region controls, and there are fewer regions than DVD had - which means greater, not lesser, consumer acceptance of the format on region bounds.
Plus, the storage capacity of HD-DVD (the other thing commonly touted as it's inferiority) is more than plenty for 1K HD content,
Not if you also want lossless audio, or have a longer movie with a lot of detail. Then you have to make sacrifices. You've also forgotten that this is the year some systems will start to support Deep Color in HDMI 1.3, and we'll start to see movies support that as well. A greater bit-depth for color requires more space.
You go pick which is more important to you.
As an engineer it has always seemed pretty obvious to me.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Toshiba should have demanded that the 360 carry an HD-DVD drive standard.
That move would have won the format war outright.
A little less clear, but I feel just as certain victory would have Microsoft include HD-DVD with the Elite model. That would have been around the time of the Paramount switch, and the momentum of those two moves would have fed off each other to spook people away from Blu-Ray and probably get either Fox or Disney to go neutral in teh same way the Warner move has spooked people off HD-DVD and probably is forcing retailers and consumers to support Blu-Ray exclusively very soon.. It's not like you can really argue at that point it would have made the 360 cost prohibitive since it would only be on the top-line model anyway.
Just as Sony won the format war through costly initial action, so Microsoft helped destroy HD-DVD through penny-pinching inaction. I guess Toshiba should have tried to wire the HD-DVD contract with the Three Laws of HD-DVD media.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Both formats are irrelevant, its easier and cheaper to just download HD content.
Pay attention everyone, this is the new meme that all the cool HD kids are spreading now in some kind of bizarre "Scorched Earth" strategy meant to destroy both formats, after all Sony must die right?
Well lets think about both your arguments:
1) Easier. To play HD content from a disc I just place a disc in a player, and it's playing. To get HD content online I have to decide to buy it from somewhere (and have an internet connection to my system at the TV). Then I have to wait for it to buffer enough to start watching. And then I have to watch a greatly compressed video/audio experience that makes buying a decent HD set a waste. Or I can go for a torrent, and spend days downloading a full quality mvoie only risking many thousands of dollars in fines if a torrent that I must leave up for days on end is discovered. If I downloaded the content legally and want to share it with a friend I can't do that. If I downloaded it legally I load them a hard drive (!). If I have physical media, I just loan them a disc (unless - sweet irony! I have a BD burner and they have a BD-ROM, in which case I can burn a disc).
How was that easier?
2) Cheaper. Yes free is certainly cheap, though of dubious ethical value. Online downloads? Cheap indeed but either they are (a) very cheap and the media expires shortly, or (b) actually rather expensive for the same non-portable highly compressed content I mentioned before. And in the meantime I can rent Blu-Ray discs from Netflix more cheaply than any online service, and probably get them faster than a torrent and cheaper than legal online HD media.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nobody has to buy anything. And most US households will not be buying either blu-ray or hd-dvd. They'll be sticking with plain old dvd for the foreseeable future. People aren't holding back because of perceived format wars. They're holding back because there's not much value for the consumer in HD anything over what's available today.
Which reminds me, Sony execs must be popping corks and slapping high-fives about now for their decision to build Blu-Ray into the PS3. I still happen to believe putting Blu-Ray into the PS3 was a purely strategic move that hurt PS3 customers by delaying shipment and jacking up the price, but if PS3 sales (though diminished) are what put Blu-Ray over the top, it doesn't really matter, does it? Big bonuses all around for root-kitting, format-pushing, technology-bundling Sony. This victory will make them a stronger company and increase their power to set technology standards, which given their close ties to content producers (they are content producers) is bound to be good for everybody but the customer. I hate it when the bad guys go long and win big.
That makes HD-DVDs as scratchable as regular DVDs (read: very).
From what I hear, that coating on Blu-ray is very good.
Doubtful. But it would certainly have subjected the 360 to the same cost and time overruns that the PS3 suffered from.
No-one would argue that much of the 360's current success is due to it launching a year earlier with a cheaper price. Making the HD disc player optional might (in the long run) make it harder for devs to squeeze large games in, but definitely kept the console cheaper and simpler for the so-crucial first couple of years of its life.
As for putting it in the Elite, its sales weren't large enough to make much difference to Toshiba, and increasing the cost would not have helped that. Armchair analysts can call it "penny pinching", but in the world of business, the user always pays in the end. Sony's decision to sacrifice their Playstation brand on the altar of Blu-Ray success has cost them dearly, at least in the short term.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
>Most non time-crucial movies (read: movies not yet released
>in the UK) are region free on Blu-Ray as well.
Yes, now they are, when they are "fighting" versus HD DVD. But who knows about the future and when there is only Blu-ray?
>It's more widely understood by studios that region coding is
>not as good for sales, they only use it for regional control now.
So how come most DVD still have region coding?
The only way out for HD-DVD is to concede defeat and open the specification in ways that Hollywood cannot handle. By removing the DRM, and removing any RAND licensing. Allowing anybody to produce HD-DVD devices and disks without obtaining license. Only act as a certification agency.
;-).
This will allow cheap HD-DVD devices and disks to be made in China and dumped into the US market. These will be used by people wanting to rip, burn, and trade the BlueRay DVDs available in the market. That would be sweet revenge
There is a huge market potential for HD-DVD in backups.
-anandsr
Basically all media come in two formats: A cheap and popular version and a marginally technically better but far more expensive version that hangs on but never holds sway. The better more expensive version always takes the lead early on because early adopters are willing to pay premium prices for quality products. Then the R&D giant behind it leverages the popularity to ramp the licensing cost at just the wrong inflection of the demand curve, driving consumers to the adequate and cheap version until you can't find content in the high quality version any more and Betamax version buyers lose all their investment in quality equipment and content.
It's easy know which version is which because Sony is almost always behind the expensive one.
SCSI, and all the iSAS evolved variants, are examples of the Betamax of hard drives. Notice you can't get one in decent capacity for any price these days?
It's like watching all the Friday the 13th sequels actually. Each time it looks like it's going to be a new movie, and then it's the same movie all over again.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's just a flesh wound!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
I'm pro-HD DVD myself, but this "Sony vs Microsoft" or "Sony vs Toshiba" crap has to end.
Sony was the largest backer of Blu-ray and was involved in its early development. But Blu-ray is a format controlled by a wide consortium of interests, of which Sony is a small player. Blu-ray was designed to appeal to studios, and to some extent, it does more than HD-DVD: Studios want region encoding, they want (however moronic it might be) 1980s software style copy prevention schemes (which, effectively, is what BD+ allows them to do. Make your discs faulty and then write Java code to make the player ignore the faults. Wow. That worked really well back when Woz was building disk drives...), and they don't want to be forced to sell anything other than a disc. HD DVD appealed to consumers. It's designed to be reliable at the expense of the discs being easier to copy. It's not region encoded. And it made managed copy a mandatory feature.
These feature collections have nothing to do with promoting Sony, Microsoft, or Toshiba, and there's pretty much no way any of these three companies could suddenly start dictating terms to the studios if the format they've nailed their colours to succeeds.
So can we stop using Sony as a reason to attack Blu-ray?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Not really. I thought so too, but in practice, HD-DVD wins. (And I'm not just saying this because of my job; for all I know, our company will be forced into Blu-Ray, or something completely different.)
What Blu-Ray has going for it (other than this latest blow) is capacity and bandwidth, and a ton of empty promises about features which are mostly not implemented. And capacity, at least, was rumored to be about killed by some triple-layer HD-DVD format, which would beat dual-layer Blu-Ray by a gig.
What HD-DVD has (had?) is price and features. Since people are pronouncing the format dead, I think I'm entitled to one last rant -- I am an HD-DVD developer.
So here's how it breaks down: Blu-Ray requires entirely new equipment to press. HD-DVD can modify existing DVD equipment. There have also been (barely) sub-$100 HD-DVD players at some point -- that's yet to happen for Blu-Ray, cheapest I've seen is a $200 drive (not a standalone player).
The price of the discs is mostly irrelevant, as now is really not the time to be buying discs to keep. But I would expect them to be cheaper, and there was also the strange run of dual-format (HD-DVD and standard DVD) discs -- literally two-sided, side A for HD, side B for DVD.
Now, as to the actual technologies... Note that I have not actually seen a Blu-Ray disc play, so all of this is from what I've heard my co-workers say, and I don't remember it incredibly well. But the HD-DVD information should be dead accurate.
To start with, Blu-Ray requires AACS, and supports region coding and something called "BD-Mark". Meanwhile, HD-DVD has optional AACS (though some features are inaccessible to unencrypted discs), and does not support region coding. So even if you hate Microsoft, as a geek, you really want HD-DVD to win, for that reason.
It also supports standard dual-layer DVDs as a medium. Same HD content, good codecs (VC1, h.264, etc), scripting, but if it fits in 9 gigs, you can burn it to a cheaper disc. I don't know if it actually supports single-layer DVDs (though I imagine it does), or CDs (though I doubt it). So, low-capacity all the way up to the proposed triple-layer makes it more flexible than Blu-Ray in terms of disc format.
Blu-Ray is Java. HD-DVD is JavaScript. Having used both languages, I'm amazed anyone would argue for Java, but people do. And it almost seemed logical -- I expected the Java to be faster, but it's not.
Let that sink in a moment. In the actual, real-world use, any Blu-Ray player other than the PS3 is slow as hell with simple menu animations. By "slow as hell", I mean you will actually see it redrawing each frame in blocks, for a tiny menu taking up maybe an eighth of the screen. HD-DVD, on the other hand... Well, I can make it slow, but not that slow. Half-second animations that take up half the screen are, at worst, a little jerky, but never do you see it redrawing in chunks like that.
Now, just guessing, but I suspect that Blu-Ray hands over more control to the Java itself -- that is, it is actual Java code doing those animations. Not so with HD-DVD -- I just tell it to change some property (x, y, width, height, opacity, etc) by some amount over some duration, and let the player handle the rest -- probably with native code, probably a good chunk of it in video hardware.
And, from what I've heard through the grapevine, Warner's actual tech people agree with me -- they'd much rather work with HD-DVD and with JavaScript. So this smells like an executive decision, made for strategic reasons, not technical ones, and certainly not with the consumer in mind.
HD-DVD also has a much stronger base of what's required. Even in those sub-$100 players, you get:
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This is *NOT* just a Sony Corporation technology! It's an Association of company's
From wikipedia:
The current 18 board members (as of December 2007) are:
* Apple Inc.
* Dell
* Hewlett Packard
* Hitachi
* LG Electronics
* Mitsubishi Electric
* Panasonic (Matsushita Electric)
* Pioneer Corporation
* Royal Philips Electronics
* Samsung Electronics
* Sharp Corporation
* Sony Corporation
* Sun Microsystems
* TDK Corporation
* Thomson
* Twentieth Century Fox
* Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group / Buena Vista Home Entertainment
* Warner Home Video Inc. (Exclusively as of January 4 2008)
I think this format war belongs to the 35+ demographic. I was talking with a couple tech savy neighbourhood kids to get a feel for where they were at. Their response? "You buy that shit? Why don't you just download it, that's what we do." They're bypassing this entire nightmare.
$1000 players, $500 HDCP strippers, format "A" vs. format "B", cables, plugs... ad nausium. The generation that matters in the next 10 years are laughing at us 'old' people. They could care less about physical media when on-line on-demand is available.
The warranties haven't even expired on some of these HD-DVD boxes people spent a lot of money on and the format has already been declared dead. My age group is the last generation used to "owning" physical media. For us the format matters. Remove the media as in download on demand, whatever the source, and none of this matters.
I'll wait for several reasons. Least of which, is that either format is moot as is DRM so long as the direction is toward downloading. Cable has on demand viewing, Netflix has started the same thing. I don't think the next 5-10 years is going to be about physical media. Corporations are still battling over a format when it's replacement is available and in use. Things are moving quicker then they have in the past. I declare both formats dead or at least very temporary.
-[d]-
"What?"
""Nothing -- here's your nine pence."
"I'm not dead!"
"Here -- he says he's not dead!"
"Yes, he is."
"I'm not!"
"He isn't."
"Well, he will be soon, he's very ill."
"I'm getting better!"
"No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment."
"h, I can't take him like that -- it's against regulations."
"I don't want to go in the cart!"
"Oh, don't be such a baby."
"I can't take him..."
"I feel fine!"
"Oh, do us a favor..."
"I can't."
"Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long."
"Naaah, I got to go on to SCO's -- they've lost nine today."
"Well, when is your next round?"
"Thursday."
"I think I'll go for a walk."
"You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there something you can do?"
"I feel happy... I feel happy.
[whap]"
"Ah, thanks very much."
"Not at all. See you on Thursday."
"Right."
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
If Blu-ray becomes the dominant video format (over DVD and downloads), how much income (from sales and licensing) does this bring to Sony? I know Blu-ray is primarily "Sony's format," but there's a lot of "partners" in the Blu-ray Disc Association. Will this Blu-ray related income be worth the loss in gaming income?
Year: Gaming operating income/(loss), total operating income
2007: (¥232 billion), ¥72 billion
2006: 9, 226
2005: 43, 146
2004: 68, 99
2003: 113, 185
2002: 83, 135
2001: (51), 225
2000: 77, 223
1999: 136, 339
1998: 117, 520
Sony's Annual Reports (big freakin' PDF files): http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/ar/Archive.html
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