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.
Blu-Ray is so much easier on the tongue than a mouthful of acronym(s).
This is of course great news (that the war is over - nothing to do with who won), but having forked out for a Blu-Ray disc lately (running around $50 over here) I can honestly say that I wish I had not fallen for the blandishments of that sales guy who told me I should buy a smaller, but much higher definition, TV.
If I had my buying decision over I would say after the initial technogasm brought on by seeing every hair on the actor's heads, you very quickly forget about the quality and just wish your screen was bigger. (Apparently this is a common effect.)
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
Exactly. When will huge multinational corporations stop forcing competition down people's throats and realize that what consumers want is monopolies, lack of choice and the resulting high prices!
This space available.
I've heard they're going to phase it in
Heavy Goods Vehicles / Trucks for the first month on the right side
then cars / bikes later on
May there be a niche market of stupid rich guys waiting for you up in heaven.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
And in other news, satan is ice skating to work today.
1) Clever Sig 2) ????? 3) Profit!
For those that think we're better off without standards, imagine if there were multiple competing HTTP protocols.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
The real competition is DVD. HD media isn't doing terrible by any means, numbers wise it is doing better than DVD was at this time in its life cycle. However DVD sales are dominating both HD formats. And thanks to this competition prices should continue to be reasonable as HD adoption hasn't taken over yet. Thus this lone single format should be good for HD business, and for consumers.
Insert something witty here...
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.
Gaming sites report that Toshiba hasn't given up yet. I guess they want to deplete their HD-DVD hardware before killing the format.
I don't want more choice, I just want better stuff.
The only thing that I find unfamthomable is the use of some of the colors on the road.
For example they only use white paint for the lines. In the States they use white and yellow. You can tell the difference real quick which lanes are for your direction of traffic (white) and which is the divider line (yellow). I've had more than a few moments of panic where I could not tell for the life of me which lanes were which.
I take that back there are two things about driving in the UK, the second is do you people believe in F'ing street/road signs? Considering that the names of the streets change every 3 blocks and they don't run in a straight line more than 25 yards at a go, it would be simply amazing to have both the street and the cross street names on a sign, you are lucky just to even have a cross street that you can see from the road you are travelling on.
I foresee a GPS in my immediate future.
Except that the Blu-ray specification is such a mess that there is exactly one Blu-ray player on the market that is worth buying as it will be properly compatible - the Playstation 3.
The Playstation 3 has outsold all other high-definition disc players on the market put together by a huge margin. This is the only machine that disc manufactures will make sure is fully compatible.
If this situation continues, and the other manufacturers don't drastically improve their performance, then Blu-ray is set to become almost as proprietary to Sony as the UMD.
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.
Toshiba will think twice next time when it comes to forcing competing formats on consumers.
I bet you post comments on YouTube.
1 HD-DVD Player, never used. Best offer accepted.
(Please...)
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
They might have beaten HD DVD but they haven't beaten the biggest contender.. DVD.
The Xbox360 doesn't have a HD-DVD drive it has a normal old DVD drive. The HD-DVD is an extra thing that you have to buy and place next to your XBox360, Microsoft will simply release a BluRay extension drive. For games it doesn't matter, since neither is used in games.
Yes.
The current 18 board members (as of January 2008) are:
Like the PS2 was one of the biggest DVD players in the beginning, the PS3 will be the biggest Blu-ray player... that is untill in 1 1/2 year a $100 Samsung / LG profile 2.0 Blu-ray comes on the market.
"This should be fun, and by fun, I mean a wholly depressing insight into the cognitive ability of some grown adults."
Whenever anyone mentions England driving on the right, I think; "Good, won't be affecting the rest of us in the British Isles then."
Although it would make crossing the borders interesting.
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
People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Its an interesting definition of disastrous to say that the biggest selling HD console has been a disaster, and as for the idea that bundling Blu-Ray into the box wasn't a smart move this has been cited from the beginning as a major issue with XBox 360 in that while MS backed the HD-DVD standard they didn't integrate it into the box because of the desire to get the console to market quicker. This led to a market in which one "HD" console has HD level movie content (and similarly large available storage on its gaming disks) and the other has an after point of sale device with no gaming advantage.
Anyone who thinks this wasn't part of the strategic play for Sony and that having the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market won't help PS3 sales is looking at this from a purely gaming perspective.
Wii remains the family console, Sony is now the HD player and the "pretty" graphics console option.
The biggest question is now where this leaves XBox as it is in a real bind as to how quickly they role out a Blu-Ray player extension to stop people buying the PS3 to get Blu-Ray and whether they release a new XBox 360-HD edition that has Blu-Ray baked in.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
So what? Macs have better success in desktop publishing than PCs, that doesn't change that fact that 90%+ of all computers are PCs.
Mini-disc became Mini-HD
And no one but Sony uses either of them.
Memory stick is still being used.
by Sony products. Face it, Sony has a poor track record for format introductions. Want some more examples?
DAT (digital audio tape)
"Universal" Media Disc (UMD)
Super Audio CD (SACD)
ATRAC
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Except that the Blu-ray specification is such a mess that there is exactly one Blu-ray player on the market that is worth buying as it will be properly compatible - the Playstation 3.
And even that one isn't feature-complete with regards to the audio codecs that BD supports. To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a single BD player out there that supports the full range of options that are in the BD spec.
This guy's the limit!
SOny decided to go off on a tangent...
and so on, and so on... a little research is in order, before throwing on the Sony Troll hat.
We tried in the 70's.
My theory about why it failed is that this was the same time the government decided we needed to slow down on our huge highway system. So 70+ Mph roads were reduced to 55 Mph. About the same time, there was an attempt to introduce the Metric system, requiring cars to have kph on their dials and Speed Limit signs to include it as well. The problem (my theory) is that they chose to equate 55 Mph to 80 Kph. It didn't take a calculator to figure out that 80 Kph is closer to 50 Mph, because it was clearly obvious on your own speedometer! So drivers eschewed the Metric system so they didn't have to slow down even more. If the powers that be had had the greenest of green marketing team, even they would have realized posting 90 Kph (almost 56 Mph) would have garnered more public acceptance.
But as a result of the attempt, we now live in a perpetual limbo. Gas and milk are sold by the gallon. Cola (soda pop, whatever you call it) is sold by the liter. Everyday life is measured in inches, feet, yards, and miles, while anything scientific is carried out in meters. Dry medicine is measured in milligrams, but our weight in pounds. Sigh...
Xesdeeni
I refused to get in the middle of HD DVD vs. BluRay and refuse to catch BluRay now that this supposed war is over. The BluRay format has bounced around like a damn super ball and No I am not buying a Playstation 3 for the purposes of watching movies. I want a machine that will remove my need for my upconverting DVD player and above all else the format and player are solid, finished, and done. Versioned software 1.1, 1.2, 2.0 is good. Versioned hardware is bad. Somebody wake me when Sony is tired of tinkering and actually settles on the final standard. No, having new features become available for new hardware isn't an option all it does is screw the original purchasers (take a look at 1.0 spec players).
It's ironic... the cheapest crap DVD players from China will play anything vaguely resembling an optical disc with files vaguely resembling a standard published somewhere just fine, but expensive high-end players even choke on discs they're SUPPOSED to be able to play. I had a friend with the exact same problem... the $600+ Denon he had in his living room refused to play anything from a DVD+R, but the $129 no-name player from WalMart in the bedroom worked just fine (this was a few years ago, as you can tell from the prices).
Concerns about 1.1 players aren't completely unfounded thanks to BD+ and its DRM "enhancements". BDA has reserved every right to revise the Blu-Ray standard in a way that would render 1.0 (and possibly 1.1) players unable to play even the main feature. They haven't done it yet... but they could, and consumers (in the US, at least) would have no recourse whatsoever. It says so right on the first or second page of every new player's manual.
How about these successful standards :
Compact Disc : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc
3.5" Floppy : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#New_3.0-3.5.22_formats
Betacam : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam
And Mini-disc is very popular in Asia. Just because it failed in your small part of the world doesn't mean it didn't take off somewhere where there's an actual population bassin.
It's funny how people always bash Sony for even trying to bring new stuff out to market.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
It's ironic... the cheapest crap DVD players from China will play anything vaguely resembling an optical disc with files vaguely resembling a standard published somewhere just fine, but expensive high-end players even choke on discs they're SUPPOSED to be able to play. I had a friend with the exact same problem... the $600+ Denon he had in his living room refused to play anything from a DVD+R, but the $129 no-name player from WalMart in the bedroom worked just fine (this was a few years ago, as you can tell from the prices). You are so right on the money. You have no idea how many tortured conversations I've had with idiot clients that went something like this:
Client: The DVD your sent me is worthless! It doesn't work! Send me another one!
Me: Sir, what brand player do you have?
C: It's a Marantz, their top of the line! Your product is crap! I want a new DVD!
Me: Sir, the Marantz players are not compatible with DVD-R/RW or DVD+R/RW media, and they do not properly implement the full DVD specification. It's not our disc, it's your player.
C: [frothing] That's impossible! It's the most expensive player on the planet! I paid $8,000 for that DVD player! It's made of precious metals! It has to be the best because it costs the most! Your product is the problem! I demand a new disc!
Me: Sir, there's nothing we can do to make it play on your Marantz. If you call Marantz they will confirm it will not play burned media. I suggest you go purchase a cheap $99 upscaling DVD player at Wal-Mart. It will play our discs just fine and with a quaility indistinguishable from your Marantz.
C: [completely unhinged] That's insane! How could a $69 player work better than my platinum-encased $8,000 Marantz? It must be your disc at fault!
Eventually I convince the client that reality does indeed exist. They try the cheap player. They see it work. They try the same disc in their gold-plated uber-player and it doesn't work. They feel like complete asses for spending that kind of dough on a DVD player. Next client, please.
Barnum was right.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?