Slashdot Mirror
Toshiba Making Funeral Plans for HD DVD
Blue Light Special writes "With HD DVD on life support, Toshiba is reportedly preparing to bow to the inevitable and allow HD DVD to expire quietly. 'While denying that a decision on the fate of HD DVD has been made, a Toshiba marketing exec left the door wide open. "Given the market developments in the past month, Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players," Jodi Sally, VP of marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products, said.'" A few folks have also noted that Wal-mart is joining the Blu-ray train, further lowering the stock of HD DVD.
HD-DVD was cheaper for both players and movies, but I'm glad the format war is officially over. Especially with wal-mart throwing their (considerable) weight behind BD. I just can't stand the fact that Sony won. Oh well. I'm still not buying a BD player until they get sub-$200.
Had I not received a PS3 as a gift, I probably would have went HD DVD. But given the circumstances, I'm glad (and suprised) that the choice will eventually only be one single format.
Hopefully I'll soon be able to get all of my favorite movies in high definition, not just the particular ones owned by production companies who signed specific format deals.
A lot of people won't be happy about it, but I've gotta admit I'm impressed with how Sony marketing pulled this off. I definitely didn't see it ending this way.
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
So, since the format war is over, does this mean the PS3, with a bundled Blu-Ray drive, has more to recommend it in the market place?
Especially since the "fear and doubt" of buying an obsolete format, are no longer hanging over it?
I'm glad blu ray has won.
My point of view: I don't watch movies. I don't even own a television. What format is better for movies and TV doesn't matter to me.
What does matter for me, however, is being able to use a re-writable form of the media for making backups. HD-DVD only offered 15 gigabytes of storage; Blu-Ray offers 25 gigabytes of storage.
Now that a format is decided on, economies of scale can kick in and, in a few years, blu-ray blank media will be as cheap as DVD media is right now (I just bought 100 DVD blanks for under $23 at a two-for-one loss leader sale at CostCo; I remember, five years ago, when DVD blanks were $3 or more per disk at the same time CDR blanks were 30 cents a disk).
There must be a time limit, ok it has been 30 years, I no longer have to hate them. :)
Just my thoughts, I am sure there will be many that will disagree.
Quid Pro Quo, nothing more, nothing less.
They should have pushed the combo discs harder via advertising. I think people would have taken to the idea that they could buy a combo disc (for the same price as a standard HD DVD, eat a little profit there guys) and use it in their DVD player right now and in their HD DVD player when they were cheap enough (like now). But few people knew about them or what they were and they were rarely on the shelves. They made several marketing errors with the format (no v2 xbox360 with HD DVD built in being another) and chose to try to sell it on the definition alone, which wasn't a strength over the BD setup. No region encoding? Awesome.
I really only want documentaries in HD (planet earth) so I don't much care about HD yet and I'm saddened that I'll have to buy some crippled format if I ever want the content. But for me, Blu Ray = Vista, I'll skip it if I can.
Because people who just want to watch hi-def movies (and I can definitely tell the difference on my TV between upscaled SD and true HD) don't care which is "better". I sure didn't. If HD-DVD had won I would have bought an HD-DVD player. But once it became apparent that Blu-Ray had won, I went out and bought a Blu-Ray player and I have Blu-Ray movies on their way from amazon right now.
Why is Blu-Ray inferior? If "inferior" means "where all the movies are going", then I guess inferior it'll have to be. But the people who just want to use hi-def disks for storage are a minority. A vocal one, apparently, but a minority.
The best medium in the world that has nothing that most people want to use it for is of little use, after all.
And I don't see why one or the other is inferior or superior over the other, either. This is not a request to inundate me with tech specs or whining about how your pet format won or lost, though, like every other blog post on the net seems to be.
Blu-Ray won. People, just deal with it. Did people whine this much when VHS won out, too?
i am a soviet space shuttle
This war was not about consumers, it had nothing to do with people in any way. It was about licensing fees. MS wanted to secure it's hold on MPAA DRM contracts (see Netflix explanation on why they can't offer Linux or Mac streaming yet to understand this) and Sony wanted to increase PS3 sales and ensure their home theatre setups did not get encroached on by Toshiba.
On top of that the per disk money Sony and/or Microsoft gets for the "interactive" portions.
This was a war about money and control, the consumer had nothing to do with it except as an afterthought in trying to figure out how to market one particular version of DRMd crap over another.
You forget the driving factor... companies do not care about the consumer any more, the fact they need consumers is unfortunate in their eyes. Large corporations have not cared about the individual consumer over the all mighty dollar for decades. They care about the consumer and their employees only enough to be efficient on the bottom line. Bad PR means less revenue. There are entire JOBS where people are payed to research this balance of "how badly can we screw people and still have them buy our stuff"
All the people who shop at Circuit City, Best Buy etc instead of mom and pop shops caused this. All you have to do is get into those stores, and only megacorps can, and you are golden. Consumers have never learned to control the corps, which despite what they may think IS possible. See above paragraph on people who are payed to deal with balancing PR. It is YOUR responsibility to force companies to do what you want by voting with your money. If your beliefs aren't worth not owning a copy of some DVD well they weren't very strongly held.
I supported the HD DVD format while it was viable (until WB pulled out). The silver lining is that the competition between the formats made hardware very, very cheap. Less than 18 months into the launch of both formats, we had HD DVD players go for ridiculously low sums. Blu-Ray backers didn't counter with matching prices, but they did drop the prices of their players (to sub-$500 levels). Software, too, became a bit cheaper. In-store, non-web pricing of high-def media was usually $29-$39, a good two- or three-fold increase over the regular DVD price. In 2007, especially in the summer and fall, there were numerous great deals on Blu-Ray discs. For every sale on HD DVD media, there were 4 or 5 on Blu-Ray: buy one, get one frees, etc. This was a smart move, as it lowered the cost of entry for people who had PS3s and honestly weren't too excited about the new formats. Now instead of paying $10 or $15 more at the store, the price difference would be $5 or less.
Of course, the counter-part to this was the whole confusion between the rival formats and a lot of people who cashed into a new format weeks before its demise. But, even if HD DVD is dead, the discs and players still work.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
It turns out that every non-techie I would talk to would ask about blu-ray but I never heard anything about hd-dvd. It turns out the techies were wrong, people bought onto blu-ray since it was something they hadn't heard and immediately understood it was a new format.
HD-DVD, on the other hand, didn't come across as a new format, but simply watching DVDs on your (new) HD television. I've had so many non-techies tell me how they are excited to get some HD-DVDs to watch on their new HDTV, not having a clue it was a different format requiring a different player.
Anyone want to apologize for getting it totally wrong? Maybe not "ipod ... lame" wrong, but still pretty wrong.
My $350 HTPC can upscale a DVD marvelously at 720p (my TV resolution) and I can't imagine the need for BD to get approximately the same picture (due to downscaling). At 1080p it might make a difference since software would be scaling to ~5x the resolution so your dynamic image processing might take over there. But you're still limited by the display. Besides, you only notice the picture sucks if you set less than ~5ft away ;)
I can't see them satisfied with the market share of 20% in next-gen consoles
The Wii is doing great, but the PS3 has been picking up quite a bit of steam. The XBox360 is also doing great in the US, but not so much elsewhere. Sony got broadsided early on, but has been surprisingly competitive as of late.
I think the interesting thing is that the Wii is selling to a lot of people who would probably never, no matter how Sony would have priced, packaged or marketed it, bought a PS3. Thus, the Wii is increasing the size of the total market, which isn't all bad for Sony. Also, the Wii is cheap enough that for those would WOULD buy one of the other consoles, it's not necessarily an either/or decision-- many can buy a Wii AND a PS3.
E pluribus unum
I don't suppose I'm the first one to think of this (or maybe I am) but it seems like they could re-brand HD-DVD from "High Definition" to "High Density" and sell the discs as blank storage media for PCs and other devices. It'd be perfect. Am I really the only one who has thought of this?
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
If you just want to watch movie (most people do) any Blu-Ray player will do (yes, Samsung fixed the problem that lawsuit as around where a few discs would not play).
If you want to be able to shop FROM YOUR disc a specialized web store based on the movie you just watched - well then, may God have mercy on your soul.
HD-DVD had all kinds of cool internet features - that hardly anyone used more than to show it could be done.
Oh yeah, I forgot the other hot thing you can do with internet access from your movie player - watch up to date trailers, just like you can on your PC. Wohoo!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley