Next-Gen DVD Format War Officially Over
February 18th, 2008 by Ed Lau |
With a press release today, Toshiba officially announced that they would no longer be producing anything HD-DVD, ending the format war with Sony’s Blu-Ray. They also said that they had no plans to produce Blu-Ray products for the time being and all HD-DVD production will cease in March. This is probably bad news for anyone who shelled out the cash for a HD-DVD player or Microsoft’s HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360. I admit, I was lured by the attractive price tag as well but now I’m glad I decided to wait awhile before going in either direction. I saw some HD-DVD players at local stores today going for $129. Of course, they’ll all be entirely useless as there won’t be any new titles on them.
Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.
This ends months of speculation as studio after studio jumped ship and ran to Sony but I think the real nail-in-the-coffin was the recent announcement that Wal-Mart would exclusively back Blu-Ray.
This is, however, good news for consumers (well, maybe not the consumers that shelled $600 for a HD-DVD player) since we now know what to buy and maybe prices will continue to fall. I, for one, will now be picking up a PS3…although I might wait for that cool white one to be released.
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Huzzah! A Winner Is found in a contest I didn’t care about, since I don’t do HD stuff at all…
(My take - The name “HD DVD” sounds a lot better than “Blu-Ray”, which sounds more like a weapon on some random Japanese kids cartoon…)
I wonder when the HD DVD titles will come over to Blu Ray or have they all already?
or
Will everything go to online downloads? Anything else in the works?
The studios that made the switch have already begun the process of porting over their titles to Blu-Ray
And now we wait for an angered HD DVD player owner to start a class action suit against Toshiba for fraud — because Toshiba knew from the start they would fail — … or something silly like that.
This is surprising since Paramount just dropped Blu-Ray for HD-DVD, I guess they’ll be going back. And let’s not forget all the porn productions supporting the cheaper HD-DVD.
I wonder if somebody else will just take up the banner to produce more HD-DVD titles?
Who pays for porn?
Besides…sometimes you don’t want things to get too detailed…
[...] with the next-generation DVD format war all but over, I thought I should invest in a Blu-Ray player. I’ve been wanting to just buy either that or [...]