Official: HD DVD Dead – Blu-ray Wins February 19, 2008
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It had been speculated but Toshiba finally brought the curtain down on the high-definition (HD) movie war with Blu-ray today by announcing it’s pulling the plug on HD DVD.
“We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. "While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality.”
Toshiba will scale back production of players from now and cease altogether in March. The question now is when will Microsoft ditch it's HD DVD add-on drive for the Xbox 360? Even more importantly, when will it launch a Blu-ray one or, slightly more radical, a 360 with an in-built Blu-ray drive?
The HD DVD format had a disastrous 2008 with more partner desertions than rats from a sinking ship, which has led to the end of the high-profile HD war with Sony’s Blu-ray format. It’s bad news for early adopters of HD DVD players and movies and a disappointment for those in the AV community that claimed HD DVD had advantages over Blu-ray as a HD movie format.
For the vast majority of consumers that have held-off buying into HD movies, things will be a lot less confusing in the coming months when all retailers will start pushing Blu-ray players. Hopefully, we’ll start seeing cheaper, dedicated Blu-ray players now since they have been way too expensive.-Martin Lynch
[Thanks to dbtechno for the image]
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
Contributor | Tamlin Magee
Comments
Ahh a sad day. I really thought HD-DVD would have one. I guess at the end of the day neither will win. The future is on-demand content downloads.
Why do you think we going to see cheaper BlueRay players ?
Sony now control the market as a monolopy what incentive is there to get the price point down ?
It's a shame a region free cheap hi def format lost out to a controled expensive format.
IMHO the consumer is the loser in both camps.
The future may eventually be on-demand downloads but that's at least 10 years or more away. Not because the tech isn't there - the bittorrent model of distribution handles this brilliantly - but because the infrastructure simply isn't.
A torrent offering a DVD-rip of 4+ GB can take weeks on a poor connection and bad seeds. Even if I have amazing seeds all with T1 connections, my line tops out at 600kbps on a low traffic day which means at least a couple of hours. Imagine an official legal Hi-Def rip eclipsing 10GB or even 15GB! There will be nothing "instant download" about it and you know customers will only put up with a certain amount of inconvenience. So for now, the convenience of having a physical storage medium in hand is what the market likes.
I personally would like to see development of *non-volatile* robust solid state drives for Hi-Def movies. If they can just figure out how to make it impervious to EM damage, I'm thinking just selling it on flash drives might be the way to go until he internet infrastructure has been upgraded. So many advantages such as size, read speeds, cost, no moving parts and get this: updates. A second revenue stream can be developed from having downloads to *add* to your SSD copy of 'Ghostbusters'. Extra menus, games, wallpapers and even extra scenes or episodes developed post-release.
"I guess at the end of the day neither will win"
excuse me!?!?! ... Did you actually read the title of this article??
The best format lost- just like with the Betamax - Vhs war in the 80's.
This sucks-
But as only got 360 HD (for cheap- £60 with 4 films!) this isn't a real problem. - can now buy all the HD-DVD's cheap! as everyone will be selling them off.
But as only got 360 HD (for cheap- £60 with 4 films!) this isn't a real problem. - can now buy all the HD-DVD's cheap! as everyone will be selling them off.
Yes my friend. That is the exact situation and according to the market search firms Bu-ray's sale dropped 40 percent from previous month. anyway you can buy damn cheap hd dvd from dvdstreet.co.uk. Check it out.