Blu-ray heads for the gulag

Paramount didn't decide to go HD, they got paid to. The Toshiba A2 didn't "Go on sale for $99" it's a discontinued model that didn't sell that was dumped cheap. While HD-DVD is all Toshiba, Blu-Ray is not all Sony you have a choice who to buy from.

What a bunch of FUD.

Sony should have for once tried to do something different from the usual, which is come out with a proprietary format which loses each and every time! Nope, no hope for them ...

The whole format war was not so bad for consumers, since the player prices raced to the bottom much faster than if there was just one format like ol' DVD. Myself, I am still waiting out, no use in picking the sides while there is still risk to be left holding the bag.

It's over when Sony produces an HD-DVD device... Although sub-$100 HD-DVD players are very compelling.

No, really but what the heck is he talking about? 
No one is buying HD-DVD players and movie discs. A few old stock units sold in the US won't change anything, the installed customer base of HD-DVD units worldwide is so tiny compared to Blu-Ray hardware that it's no match. 
Paramount even had to inflate fake selling statistics to claim that Transformers on HD-DVD was a success, which actually is not at all. 
In practice 90% of hardware manufacturers are producing Blu-Ray media and hardware. HD-DVD doesn't even still have cheap burners on the market nor blank media available.
Other than Toshiba players and XBox360 HD-DVD USB2 add-on the Toshiba/Microsoft/Paramount/DVD-Forum alliance can't offer anything serious. 
And in Europe the new E30 1080p Toshiba HD-DVD player is going to cost 350-400Euros on average. Is that any better than a PS3 40GB, perhaps ? I really don't think so.

My parents were caught out on the Betamax vs VHS war in the early 80's, unfortunately they went for Betamax and didn't upgrade to VHS until the late 80's.

Personally at the moment I don't have a HD capable TV, I'm hoping to pick up a cheap one next year. If the prices of HD DVD are cheaper than Blu Ray I'll be more likely to go for HD DVD. Saying that if Sony were to cut the price of the PS3 by next year to about £200 then I'd seriously consider a PS3. Until then though I'm happy with my Wii and my standard def widescreen telly.

I would have thought Sony would have been used to loosing the format wars by now (I bought a Minidisc rather than an iPod, but then again I don't follow the Steve Jobs is God crowd).

Rob

come to an agreement too. The same squabbling occurred during the development of a DVD standard. The raw bandwidth and storage of Blu-ray combined with HD DVD's interactive specs and region free coding could have been a hell of a combination.

This article is totally out of context with how the interview reads in the L'inq. What he says is "It's a stalemate at the moment. We lost some of our momentum when Paramount dropped our format, and winning the prestige battle is not the end of the world". 

This sounds a long way from capitulation to me. Try and get your facts and tone right, especially if your going to post a link to the actual article. Numpties!

It doesn't mean that much? 

That must make you feel kinda silly for delaying the launch of the PS3 by almost a year so you could use it to force Blu-ray on the market?

Mr Forest, meet Mr Tree.

You guys are misrepresenting worse than usual! This guy is deviating from Sony's usual super spin, but he never even hinted at losing. Last I checked, disc sales were still about 2-1 in favor of blu ray

Thats why I always say, when it comes to technology or any two similiar products it always comes down to PRICE. Now there are plenty of A/V nerds that complain that the Toshiba player that was on sale for $99 US for 4 days only does 1080i. What the brainiacs don't get is that a lot of the people buying sets aren't spending 2 or 3 thousand on a tv but are buying the cheaper 1080i/720p sets that are going for under or just over $1,000. They are a great deal and to spend more for a screen 42" and under would be stupid. Getting that out of the way they also had cut prices on the better models too so if you wanted 1080p you could still get it cheaper than a blu-ray player. The people who said "betamax vs vhs again" were right I think. If Blu ray fails I do beleive it will be for the same exact reasons.

For me both formats lost, and I'm waiting for something to replace the whole failure.

Porn or not, I can't help to think that Sony has a record of failed or abandoning too many projects to see this format through.

Sony projects that never got mass market appeal...
Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC)
BetaMax
Digital Audio Tape (DAT)
Digital-8
eBook
Hi-MD
High capacity Floppy Disk (HiFD)
Memory Stick
MultiMedia Compact Disc (MMCD)
MicroMV
Mini-Disk (MD)
MiniDisc Long Play (MDLP)
Music Clip
NetMD
Professional Disc for Data (PPD)
Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS)
Super Audio CD (SACD)
Universal Media Disc (UMD)

Sony projects that were abandoned
Aibo
Clie
Copy-Protect CDs
Direct Digital Stream
DVD-RAM
Pen Tablets

Sony success... telling Apple to use 3.5" Floppy on their Macintosh.

They may not have a winning track record but one of these days that ant will move another rubber tree plant.

Just the other day I read that for each HDDVD sold, two BDs were sold...
Also, when I go through the stores, the only thing I see are BD discs and players...
I have yet to see an HDDVD player on a store...

And things are going bad for BD?

Frankly, I think I need to wait some more time... it's more confusing than ever...

This is stupid... shouldn't they decide one format alone?
I mean, we're getting to point where, for example, in the US, there are a number of types of networks for mobile phones, two standards for DTV...
If this goes on and on like this, noone will buy nothing, because noone will know what to buy in the first place.

It's just stupid.

The prices are actually fairly even. Although there are HD DVD players for 100 dollars now, until you hit 300, none of them play at 1080p, all are 1080i or less. It's like they are selling a higher standard dvd player that's unable to play higher standards. 

It's sad really that consumers are to stupid to look at the junk that they are buying.

Why do the authors of the news (especially in this line of news) always have to add that overly unnecessary line of sensational drama? 

I have to agree with a previous post stating that this format war helped to drive the prices of new technology down quicker than would have occurred otherwise, but its annoying when every news article you read has to jump on the "the format war has been decided!" headline anytime either format camp does the smallest thing.

Also, I like the outrage coming from consumers "OMG these prices are sooo high, and I don't have a guarantee that what I bought will be mainstream!" (Hint: don't buy the expensive bloody thing then, early adoption of tech is a sure fire way to lose money.) If your going to take a risk don't complain when you lose out.

@BLASter: What are you talking about ? Blu-Ray is not a proprietary closed format at all. The fact Sony proposed the format to other key players in the industry means nothing. Its specifications are open to every manufacturer joining the consortium. 
@Ernesto Pereira: DVD SDTV prices got so cheap just because manufacturers were ready to mass market new HDTV units and standards. You can be sure that if standards weren't ready then they wouldn't have lowered DVD prices so quickly. Toshiba must be in desperate mode to play the cheaper card in the US, however in Europe the new E30/E35 Toshiba HD-DVD 1080p players cost 350-500Euros which is far from cheap. 

Toshiba/DVD-Forum and Microsoft trying to push an inferior optical format such as HD-DVD is no good for customers. Blu-Ray has got 50GB available capacity from the beginning and can go up to 200GB, probably even mantaining read compatibility with many old hardware units. HD-DVD is limited to just 30GB which is not much for 1080p H.264 and PCM audio movies, it limits the peak bitrate which means overall lower perceived quality due to higher compression, and the VC-1 Microsoft standard hack of older MPEG-4 ASP gives even worse results, despite Microsoft marketing hype machine telling otherwise. 
If you want to enjoy HDTV at the highest available quality then Blu-Ray is the way to go. And let's hope HD-DVD disappears quickly so that studios will start re-printing even already released BD movies with some deluxe highest allowed bitrates releases to fill the 50GB that they still don't use as they should, simply because HD-DVD is limited to 30GB (Warner with its dual-format releases just does 1 encode for both instead of optimizing for the highest available bitrates on Blu-Ray)

... all you need to know about which format is winning

Both will go away as the cost of flash continues to go down

I believe both formats can survive side to side. The Blueray camp can merrily sell their movies to the millions of people who have bought the PS3 console!
What?!? It has sold how many units worldwide?!?
Oh damn! There goes my premise...

Sony is on the ropes but this article is mildly over spun. Still in the full article is a bit of a candid surprise for a CEO to make with the battle still on. 

Not exactly the words that would instill confidence in game developers/publishers neck deep in producing games for the PS3. I'm sure the Blu Ray and PS3 marketing department crew are looking for a high enough window to jump out of. 

Maybe knowing that Toshiba will be building HD-DVD players with Xbox 360 support in 2009 is what he's prepared for.

I agree with you AP, the author of this article has taken things all out of context and decided not to report the truth just like many cheezy, blazen tabloids! " Blu-ray goes to the Gulag" Sony CEO most definately did not say...

Having worked in retail for a while, I'd have to say here in the UK the Blu Ray stuff isn't doing too badly at all. I'm on a gap year and spend a lot of time behind an electronics desk, and it's very rare that I ever see HDDVDs go through the till. Loads of BluRay stuff does though...

... is that they're pretty much irrelevant to what a consumer actually wants. For me, the deal-breaker was Sony's decision to aggressively segment up the world into even more regions. Sorry Sony, but I'm used to being able to buy my DVDs from whatever country I like and being able to play them. I'm not interested in sponsoring any company who would seek to remove my ability to do this.

Sony's other formats haven't exactly been consumer-targeted, either: Memory stick? Unsupported on anything but Sony devices. Minidisc? Never saw the point - they could have owned the floppy disc market for several years if they'd allowed PC drives to flourish, but instead IOMega took that market. Who is Sony expecting to buy their stuff, exactly? Consumers are steering away, and for good reason - Sony kit usually means a raw deal is in the equation.

So, to hear that a consumer-unfriendly format is about to bite the bullet does not surprise me, really. Even Betamax wasn't that good - who wants a video recording format that stores only 1 hour's worth, regardless of picture quality? It's no wonder that VHS totally trounced it.

As AP mentioned, I'm personally waiting for HVD formats to make the big-time. They have the potential to make even Blu-Ray's storage potential look like a floppy disc's by comparison. 50GB isn't that impressive when there is the possibility of >1TB on a single disc, with a 120MB/sec data transfer speed. When HVD hits the market, nobody will remember Blu-Ray. It will be like DAT: Long-forgotten.

I can't understand why anyone would buy a camaro over a corvette, buy a volkswagen over a porche..... if they were almost the same cost.

1080p and enormous capacity (and growing).

why the hell would geeks on here complain about 2-3 dollar differences?

The better format is blu-ray. being that everyone knows that, only kiddie-types with xbox's as their savior love hddvd.

without 1080p on all disks, there is no reason to switch from dvd. (i know that all blu-rays arent 1080p, but they will be)

Sony just doesn't get it. Screwing customers does not make for increased sales. They put their name on a product, slap on a high price, and figure it will sell because it's a Sony. Meanwhile they put rootkits on their music cd's and infect their formats with drm. I guess their ceo is starting to see the writing on the wall. If hd-dvd sells well this holiday season by spring some studio will jump ship to hd-dvd. And that will be the end of Blue-Ray. Good riddance say I. Sony you stupid arrogant *ssholes. You deserve your fate.

Its the future! 

Why have a stupid proprietary disc format? Its just as DRM'd as VOD, except that VOD would take up lots less physical space on shelves and you wouldn't have to repurchase all your DVDs on the next new format. 

Heck, they could just ship out flash drives with high def on them in some DRM format too. Doesn't really matter what the medium, they will always be using DRM. At least software incompatibilities can be resolved much more easily than: this disc needs a red laser while this other disc needs a blue laser.

I love it when hubris-leaden corpo-behemoth-execs like Sony's get their collective asses handed to them. Of course, this changes nothing. But what a BD-PS3-Cell disaster for them, if they lose this format war. Microsoft may be a bunch of socially-challenged geeks, not without a large helping of arrogance themselves, but they're not dumb.

I own both, with and Xbox HD-DVD player (first to be $200) and then a BR drive in my laptop (no I didn't buy a dead PS3 the Wii is my second console). 

This war has kept almost ALL of my friends from buying EITHER, because even $200 was too much for a player that might be useless, at least now the $99 player is like buying any other player so it can play regular DVDs then they aren't worried. 

Joreg, HD-DVD burners are just as expensive as BR ones, but you are right media is harder to find because the BR disks were available before the burners were, but $30-50 per disk never made it compelling versus the cost of an external HDD. 

IMO the potential killer app for HD-DVD is the combo disk option. If more titles were released that way and close to the normal cost of a regular DVD launch, BR would die very quickly; because despite the talke of A being better than B in this battle, even the top selling titles overall sales in their lifespan never reach even 10% of the first weeks sales of a regular DVD. So for people on the fence, buying a COMBO disk is a nice option, and just like the players if the price premium were minimized to near nil, then the flood of purchases would go through the roof just trating it like a tweaked bonus DVD.

BR wasted it's main advantage by starting with single layer disks at launch while HD-DVD had dual layer (thus giving HD-DVD a 5 GB advantage), with the option of additional layer HD-DVDs now a fture option and still being cheaper to produce than BR, BR's main advantage was squandered. Also do I care if the bonus features are on a second disk versus on the same disk as the title? Not really.

What people don't see enough IMO is that when the companies pay for these exclusivity deals, that's money they need to recoup from the consumers, which means we lose title selection options and have to pay a premium for that loss. Als Sony's control of the hardware format as well as studio content is a situation that hurts the consumer, if Sony weren't involved IMO we would have cheaper dual-format players long ago.

The sooner the war is over the better for consumers IMO.