HD-DVD confirmed dead
Hip hip, Blu-ray!
FOLLOWING REPORTS that it is set to dump HD DVD, Toshiba has pretty much confirmed its tactical retreat from the HD-DVD battleground.
The Blu-ray camp, led by Sony, may finally get this market their own way.
Company sources at Toshiba said it is mulling three main options.
Option One: Stop selling recorders and specialise in players. Option two: withdraw from the Japanese and US markets and march on Europe, where sales are stronger. Option Three: retreat completely from the next-generation DVD business. Expect a final decision before March.
It won’t be easy for Toshiba to pull out. US movie studios like Paramount Pictures, not to mention Microsoft, are loyal to the HD-DVD format. So they’ll have to be consulted. Toshiba executives can expect some stormy, table thumping meetings in the next couple of weeks. (Note to Toshiba execs: might be a good idea to do those meetings by video conferencing if you can get away with it)
In all likelihood, Toshiba will continue to sell HD-DVD machines on a limited basis for now. Their public failure to create a global standard, when knowledge gets out, will excacerbate the sales crisis, which will force them to pull the plug eventually.
The pull-out follows a decision by some major US. film studios – like Warner Brothers - and retail giants like Walmart to get behind the rival Blu-ray standard. Toshiba tried slashing prices of HD-DVD players as recently as January, but sales didn’t pick up. In March they’re expected to post losses on this format running into billions of yen. µ
Comments
Cut price HD-DVD players
I was hoping that this would mean the prices of HD DVD players would be slashed even more (say to the £60 to £70 mark) but I guess if they're still selling fairly well in Europe then that won't happen.Is this the first format war that Sony has won?
(My parents got stung by the Betamax vs VHS war and I was stung by the MiniDisc vs CD vs DCC vs MP3 war).
Rob
Licence to print money
If it truly is all over for HD DVD, doesn't this mean Sony can have customers write blank cheques in order to get Blu-ray recording and playback kit? We can say goodbye to tumbling prices and Blu-ray discs ever coming close to costing what DVDs cost today. Some fat cats are going to be rolling in it from this. Definite backhanders happening here. I reckon WB were offered free blu-ray production or something. Some industry watchdog should start their investigation now to try and minimalise the fat cats getting fatter.About Time
It's about time someone won. I think including the Blue Ray with the PS3 is what clinched the war.Sony has always has cooler stuff I think, the Betamax was superior to VHS and the mini disk was really good too. For those who don't know the mini disk was like a floppy disk but had a recordable optical disk inside instead. Better than a CD because it was smaller and it was in a protective shell so if you flopped it down onto a table there was no worry of getting the disk scratched. I was hoping that it would be a replacement for the 1.44 floppy drive but that never happened either. Allot of the blame is on Sony for hogging the manufacturing and reproduction rights too tightly.
About time indeed
and we want the blank blu ray prices to fall below 2euros per disc.Rubbish
Toshiba has NOT confirmed any of this rumor in fact the publicly stated that they have not made any decision. Leave it to the Blu/Sony fans to publish more FUD.Not a license to print money
Andrew, perhaps you're unaware of this, but Sony doesn't control the pricing of the consumer electronics industry. Sure, it prices its own gear, but other companies charge whatever they deem appropriate. The only thing they're on the hook to Sony for is the licensing costs of the Blu-ray format, and that's insignificant (under $30 per player) when you're talking about $300-$400 players.High-def players don't cost any more than DVD players did when they first came out. BD-R media doesn't cost any more than the first DVD-R discs, and Blu-ray burners don't cost any more than the first generation CD-R drives did fifteen years ago. You're just spoiled because we *now* have $50 DVD burners, $100 DVD players, and $1 DVD-R media. It wasn't always this way.
Check your history. Prices will come down when Blu-ray becomes more widespread. The fact that fence-sitters (like me) will now go out and buy the winning format should speed high-def adoption and cause prices to decline even faster than they already have. Case in point: I bought a PS3 last week along with 11 Blu-ray titles. I had decided not to spend a dime until one of the formats was the clear winner. I am not alone in this line of thinking.
I'll buy a HD-DVD
You know what, nobody won or lost anything, it's just that the whole hi-def thing is just way too expensive!I can't even afford a PS3, even after all this time. $400 for a video game console? No way!
If Toshiba can compete on price then I would buy. Lets put it this way: a full-featured DVD recorder is less than $100. I'd pay up to $150 for a similar spec HD-DVD machine. Definitely no more than.
This pronouncement "Blue Ray has won" is way premature. Neither standard has tried to compete on price, and the one which can lower prices will win. That's what was wrong with Beta after all, Sony never got around to competing on price. I think blue ray is the one that will die. Sony is always overpriced, they never learn.
foolishness...
what would it have cost microsoft/toshiba to throw an HD-DVD drive into each xbox 360? 20 bucks at production? i think they could've easily did what sony did... flood the market with hardware. every ps3 owner basically defaults to blu-ray, so how did toshiba expect to win this one?i don't really care either way... i'm not some kind of fanboi... but the thing that pisses me off is having to call my movies "blu-ray discs" from now on... as in "hey, when is that movie coming out on blu-ray". it would've been nice to be able to keep calling them DVDs...
"Only" $30 License Fee?
A BOM license cost of $30 is a $60 cost at retail. The OEM pays Sony $30 then charges $40 to cover its overhead. The distributor charges $45 to the retailer and the buyer pays $60. That's a gigantic license fee. Brand new 3rd generation HDDVD players are selling at discounters for $129 with 7 free High Definition DVDs - imagine if the first $60 of that went for a license fee!http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3304908&CatId=2356
format wars
Sony didn't do badly in the Beta vs. VHS war...See, Sony licensed out the Alpha format to JVC to work on the superior Beta format.
JVC renamed it VHS, marketed the hell of it with lower prices, and paid Sony a royalty on everyone sold...
going going gone?
Kinda sucks HD-DVD used a little better video encoding (worse audio) then blu ray.Would be nice if they kept it as computer storage media, blank blu ray cost to much
Old movies were never recorded with HD cameras so studios just use line doubling to make them look HD. Would be nice if they kept them SD and put more then one movie on a Blu ray disc. Like all of the lord of the rings on one disc.
billions of yen
It sounds like a lot when you say it that way, but a yen is worth almost nothing. It would probably take at least a thousand yen to buy a candy bar.If you expressed it in Euros or dollars(or pounds) people might actually know what the heck you're talking about.
region coding
Region coding: Bluray has it, HDDVD doesn't.I'd think you Europeans would be more miffed about that, but maybe you just don't care about getting cheap American discs ($20 instead of 20 Pounds or whatever)...
(and with the "enhanced" DRM in Bluray, good luck finding a multiregion crack!!)
Fishy
Sounds like Sony did some underhanded maneuvers to get this done! I guess they will try and squash any other alternatives to Blue Ray as well. Why is this proprietary BS allowed to continue?Sony=Blu-ray. Not!!
HD-DVD has always been about royalties. Also Blu-ray isn't a Sony standard. Blu-ray has a lot of grandfathers. A lot of people call it a Sony standard but by our estimates Sony doesn't even have 30 percent of the IP," Doherty said. The top four intellectual property holders are likely Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, and Warner.