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.

Comments

That's a Shame

[thesaint05]

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.

Re:That's a Shame

[RetardsForRonPaul]

Unfortunately the lower cost never really materialized. All of the "combo discs" were more expensive than their Blu Ray counterparts. I never understood the point of those discs anyways. And Blu Ray was on "sale" for a long time. I have to wonder if Sony lost a bunch of money subsidizing costs just to get a foothold. That said, Sony and the rest of the BD consortium can go die in a fire. I'm not buying their crippled, DRM laden discs. I'm sick of being treated like a theif, when all I want is reasonably priced HD content. The music industry is slowly coming around, yet the movie industry is steadfast. If they want to treat me like a theif (no managed copy, region encoding, BD+, etc.) then I'll just steal their movies. The interactivity in HD-DVD always rocked. Transformers is an amazing disc. One of the few I own. BD is still catching up in that regard. It kills me, though, since I'm about over the 360, and really want a PS3 as a gaming platform.

Re:That's a Shame

[gEvil (beta)]

That's the "nice" thing about the different BD profiles--the manufacturers get to keep "updating" their player lines while keeping the price the same. This year at CES, they updated the players to profile 1.1, but kept the list prices the same. Next year, they'll update the players to profile 2.0, and the prices will stay the same (they might come down 50 bucks or so). I'm waiting for a sub-$200 profile 2.0 BD player, too, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re:That's a Shame

[barzok]

Apparently you didn't buy DVD when it was new. I paid over $500 for my first DVD player, and I didn't even get a 1st gen player (more like 1.5 gen). And that was in 1997 dollars. ... DVD really didn't take off until 3-4 years after it came out, when the players got really cheap.

1997 + 3-4 years = 2000. PS2 came out in October 2000, mass availability in early 2001.

Quick show of hands...how many bought a PS2 not because it was a game console, but because it let them get a console and DVD player in one, for not a lot more than a high-quality DVD player?

PS3/Blu-Ray is going to follow a very similar track, I think.

Re:That's a Shame

[Dogtanian]

DVD really didn't take off until 3-4 years after it came out, when the players got really cheap. Which was my exact point! Even though the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD battle that everyone was excited about is supposedly all but over, the less interesting, but ultimately much bigger war- to get people to buy hi-def players at all- isn't. As I said, the quickest way to overcome that *is* to reduce the price.

Although I don't think it'll happen here, it'd be quite possible to end up with one side technically winning, but still doing badly. Who won out of DVD-A and SACD? Who cares, because neither grabbed a notable share of the market, and hi-def audio as a whole flopped commercially.

Personally, I don't think interest in HD as a whole will flop the way that hi-def audio flopped. That doesn't mean Blu Ray should rest on its laurels, however. The most obvious problem with keeping the price high would be that it slowed adoption (as you imply).

Even if the Blu Ray camp could live with that (it'd probably make them more profit in the short term), it'd be a bad idea, simply because of the other understated factor- downloadable HD content. The market is moving that way anyway, and at this stage I reckon it's ultimately a much bigger- but less tangible- threat to Blu-Ray than the moribund HD-DVD.

In short, the battle's not over. Blu Ray faces threats from current-generation DVD and apathy on one side and the should-have-seen-it-coming threat of downloadable content bypassing their petty squabbles on the other.

The GGP was so wrong- Blu Ray players need to come down in price as much as ever.

Re:That's a Shame

[Dogtanian]

I don't want to go too far into the details, but the processing I had in mind would be a combination of several ideas I'd been mulling over, many of which would require tracking a given object over several frames to average out noise, artifacting errors, and so on. And also to use simultaneous-equation-style processing on the multiple frames of the same object to increase the static resolution (or maybe this could be done more simply by aligning, overlaying and resharpening the multiple copies). Also ideas like more intelligently spotting the difference between genuine detail and pseudo-detail which comes from encoding/compression artifacts, and removing or repairing the latter. (Repair- or guessing what the most likely hi-res detail was that caused or was damaged by the artifact- might be one of those "easier said than done" computationally intensive tasks). Again, easier if you are looking at multiple frames.

I'm not an expert in this area, but I suspect those that are have probably come up with similar ideas. Whether they're doable in reasonable time, and in hardware is more open to question.

At least it's over...

[framauro13]

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.

Re:Ew...

[samkass]

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.