Published: Tuesday 19th February, 2008 | Author: Parm Mann
Companies: Toshiba (All Toshiba content)
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email to a friendRecent events have signalled the imminent death of Toshiba's HD DVD format but as of today, it is now officially official.
At a press conference held in Tokyo, Toshiba announced that it will no longer develop, manufacture or market HD DVD players and recorders.
Toshiba President and CEO, Atsutoshi Nishida, said:
"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. 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."
During a Q&A session that followed, Nishida-san offered few details as to what would become of Toshiba's Aomori HD DVD factory but did confirm that the company currently has "no plans at all" to adopt Blu-ray.
HD DVD's short spell in the market accumulated an estimated 730,000 units sold worldwide. Today's announcement will prove a bitter pill to swallow for early adopters of the format, but Toshiba believes it faces little to no risk of class action lawsuits.
Though HD DVD is now well and truly behind us, I recently posed the question "Will Blu-ray prevail?" and indeed, the question still remains. The format war between HD DVD and Blu-ray has reached its conclusion, but the format war between Blu-ray and DVD is still going strong. Not to mention the war between Digital Distribution and everything else, that one is still getting started.
Official press release: Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD DVD Businesses
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Lucky for me ill just buy a blueray player for my pc for £60 :), sorted ay?Quote
bah, hd-dvd is better for movies so i have too say this is annoying and sad that blueray won. Blueray is for storage short and simple, the features in hd-dvd superseed that of blueray.
Umm, no they don't
Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray supported the same codecs, in fact the latter has higher capacity, and supports higher bit-rates.
Yes, the initial Blu-Ray discs were encoded using MPEG-2, but later ones are all AVC/H.264, and I think the odd few use the VC-1 codec.
Audio-wise, Blu-Ray supports everything HD-DVD did, plus DTS HD and Dolby TrueHD lossless..
Both had the same "DRM-crap", and both can use regional coding (although HD-DVD were going to implement it at a later date to act as a differentiator in the launch period).
I really hate all this FUD crap that *still* floats around...Quote
....ask my mate who is making an ABSOLUTE mint out of Laser discs he's picked up for a couple of quid and shifted for £100+ per disc.
But did anyone make a fortune out of BetaMax? I think there are no easy rules for market trend. Some movies released on both format were better on HD-DVD. In the short-medium term they may fetch a premium. Several years down the line, they will fetch a big premium IF the movie studios don't release another edition on BD that is known to have everything the HD-DVD version had.. and perhaps even some. But if there are better alternatives, I don't think the value of the HD-DVD version will remain. Okay, so there may be some die hard collectors who'll pay just for rarity; but are there more of them than copies floating around?
In my opinion, the Hi-def reduced to a single member has now a better chance of not going the same way as SACD/DVD-A (essentially super niche format, and in my opinion, a failure to what they were set out for). DVD will remain here for a while. Perhaps it will not even be entirely replaced unless the industry forcefully phase it out (I am saying this because DVD did not manage to replace VCDs and I do know people who will get the VCD version because it is that little bit cheaper). But I do think that in the long term, BD has a chance of being the dominant format at least as far as physical media is concerned.Quote
Yes, but did these collectors made money- no.
I suspect that HD-DVD goes the same way...Quote
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