Slashdot Mirror
Toshiba To Halt HD-DVD Production
Multiple users have written to tell us that Toshiba is planning to halt production of devices related to HD-DVD. According to Japanese broadcasting network NHK, Toshiba will lose "hundreds of millions of dollars" as the format war finally draws to a close. Regardless, investors are pleased that Toshiba has made the decision to cut its losses. This comes after a last-ditch price cut was unable to prevent Wal-mart from throwing their lot in with Blu-ray, although some sources suggest that Wal-mart was already aware of Toshiba's plans to withdraw from fight.
For those that think we're better off without standards, imagine if there were multiple competing HTTP protocols.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
I was kind of hoping HD DVD would win this one, now we'll be stuck with region locked movies for another decade till the next thing comes along.
Why is it that people conflate competition and competing formats? There was more competition in the Blu-Ray camp than there was in the HD DVD camp. Toshiba was dumping players, but there was still no real competition, Toshiba was the only (real) manufacturer. You can have competition when there is a single standard, no problem. There is, for example, competition in the DVD business, always has been. Are there more than one DVD format? Did the DivX fiasco add value for the consumer?
The format war would have made sure we had continued high prices for a long time to come since the war it self slowed down adoption. With slow adoption both consumers and producers will tend to do a lot of fence sitting, and that is not good for anybody since it takes longer to get to the benefits of economics of scale. Everybody but pirates benefits from this war being over.
If Bluray is a Sony format, so is DVD and CD. Sony backed it strongly and presumably did a lot ofthe original development but it's not a Sony format in the same way that minidisc and Betamax were. Sony got other companies on board as part of the standards consortium.
This might explain why it didn't fail. Companies prefer it when the standards body isn't the same organisation as their rival. There's always a risk that the standard might change specifically to favour one manufacturer.
Nobody gives a fuck. Ok ?
90%+ of average consumers don't have any clue whatsoever what "VHS" stands for, and couldn't care less.
For that matter, most consumers couldn't tell you what "HD" stands for either.
They mean the same thing to a complex mind when the formats in question are both proprietary and do about the same thing.
In this case there was competition between the formats not only in which format was "better" in terms of storage quality (not to mention archival, access speed and other properties) but also even if one format was clearly superior which was better in terms of price and availability.
I don't think having both formats around was hurting anything as both are still in early adoption phases, most users don't have Blu-Ray or HD DVD yet and a large portion perhaps even a majority don't have the capabilities to use such formats (at least in the new abilities they provide) yet over the older standard.
I still see this as a bad thing and perhaps the "wars" are not over at all as Hard Drives, Flash drives and other storage options are coming down in price and are able to offer similar amounts of storage. The real contender in these "wars" as I see it could be download bandwidth rather than delivery of a physical piece of media.
In the end these media wars are good for the consumer. Take CDs for example, a format that won with relatively little competition. The way things are sold to consumers is that the new format is more expensive at first but as it takes hold and becomes dominant is prices drop to match the old cost with a margin determined by the cost of production. Music CDs are still fairly expensive and have not come down (as I believe) to a price comparable to that of Cassettes even though the older format has been more-or-less out of the market for several years now.
For Formats it is difficult to raise prices on consumers as there is an expectation that the prices will fall over time and consumers will need a reason to pay more with the information on the format primarily being a luxury good. However that expectation works both ways as consumers expect that two items of the same format will cost about the same on average.
It's more like a product trademark to me: you don't complain that the word Panasonic is 'better' than say Toshiba, just because Panasonic literally means pro-sound and Toshiba is a compound noun where To- means Tokyo, and what -shiba is I forgot. But that doesn't still make Panasonic any 'better'.
They might have beaten HD DVD but they haven't beaten the biggest contender.. DVD.
It's a feature.
Digital Versatile Disc is a backronym - DVD originally meant Digital Video Disc, until they realized how stupid the name actually was ("Yeah, this game is distributed on a video disc. But it's not really a video..."), at which point they just redefined the abbreviation. When I think about it, I realize that HD-DVD's name is just as stupid: you can have just as High Definition audio/video or interactive media on HD discs as you can on "SD discs", just not as much.
By not having a meaning, blu-ray avoids that problem - a blu-ray disc is a disc that uses blue rays.
I do think that CD is a good name - it tells me what it is (a disc that's quite small, compared to LP's), not what they developed it to contain. But CDSDWEMRFDTDVD (Compact Disc-sized Disc With Even More Room For Data Than Digital Versatile Discs) doesn't have such a nice ring to it... Of course, today it's more of a Big Disc, compared to Minidisc or mini-DVD, which again shows that neutral names are better.
To finish off, let me just counter your "glory days" argument by saying "BetaMax" and "Video2000".
So there should be two formats or even more out in the world to give a choice for consumers? A choice to not buy either until one format wins so they don't get left with obsolete hardware where nothing new is going to be released on?
How about this, every studio comes up with their own format! That way, there's tons of choices for the consumer! Want to watch a Univeral or Paramount movie? You have to buy a special player to play their formats. Think of the possibilities! Think of the competition! Think of the illegal downloads because no one would want to put up with that bullshit!
I think your analogy needs work.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Not at all. Surgeon General says that smoking is harmful...
Betacam, Betacam SP, DigiBeta and the newer HD versions are THE standard in the video industry. Even the Betacam SP, now 20 years old at least, is very widly used and still hasn't been fully replaced by the newer digital versions, even in the "Western" video world.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."