Toshiba Execs Declare HD DVD Not Dead Yet 516
Lucas123 writes "HD DVD proponent Toshiba remains defiant that its format will not succumb to the mounting tsunami of support for Blu-ray Discs. Akio Ozaka, head of Toshiba America Consumer Products, said at CES today that he was surprised by Warner's decision." It should also be noted that the HD DVD group has cancelled many of their meetings at CES.
porn is blue ray is it not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Toshiba (Score:3, Insightful)
Blu-ray isn't the end of the world for them, as Japanese businesses are kinda incestuous and Toshiba has its own set of investments. Toshiba will make plenty of money, just not as much as they did last round.
I'm curious how Paramount deals with this. Does their contract (with MS or Toshiba) have an escape clause?
Anyway, HD DVD is done. Toshi can't be overtly honest about it until they get rid of some inventory. I saw a couple of people returning their HD DVD players, presumably from Christmas, to Target tonight. Are these people picking up PS3s? Probably some are. It's not like HD DVD owners should toss their systems, and I actually think they might be in for a pleasant round of super cheap movies and spare players.
And the Xbox 360 might even be helped by this. Think about it, the XBOX is not quiet enough to play a disc movie, at least for a lot of people. But it's just fine for downloads. Microsoft may ramp up and accelerate their download service now that this war is ending, instead of gaming each company against eachother like fools to slow adoption. Ps2 owners are slow adopted, but in my opinion 360 owners are fast adopters, and the console is more internet oriented. These people are much more likely to download movies, and I think the 360 is going to continue to do very well.
Warner did the right thing, and I'm confident there will be much more progress in HD movies. I think these films look much better than DVD, and while DVDs were much more of a revolution in technology, Blu-ray is a real step up that downloads cannot hope to compete with in the US.
We all knew this was going to end, and most of us realized bluray was going to win out. Warner had no leverage to end Blu-ray, so they used their power very effectively. And may have been planning this out. I expect to see Warner's movies all over Microsoft's system. I bet this was well known to MS, and the announcement the two companies have planned has to do with the 360's downloads.
In short, this is going to work out fine for everybody.
blueray hd dvd? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:1, Insightful)
You have got to be kidding.
Blu-ray is alive today only because a punch of pimply-faced teens got a PS3 for Christmas, and suddenly believed that they had to defend all things Sony, including the blu-ray format that they happened into by chance. The rabid, frothing pro-blu-ray hordes are a frightening sight to all, flooding the message boards with "YEAH! SUCKZORZ ON THAT PARAMOUNT!"
While Blu-ray has some technical advantages, its adoption is a massive loss for the average consumers.
Not only are users going to get fucked on the price of hardware (that is for those of us who don't want a media player in the form of game machine. When people actually intentionally buy a next generation media player, they overwhelmingly chose HD-DVD), but forget about combo discs on blu-ray. Yeah, you know that new movie -- guess you're buying it twice if you want it in both high def and able to run on the vehicle's DVD player and the old computer in the kids room. That's a part of the glorious scam of blu-ray.
Adaptive encryption...yeah, expect divx like lock-downs and timed rentals soon enough with blu-ray. It's commming....
Sony trojan horsed the PS3 into households, and then furthered their campaign by selective buyouts (I marvel that anyone believes that Warner wasn't paid off. Wait a couple of months kids, and the details will come out). Now they get to enjoy the lucre as consumers are screwed into buying hardware and software that is much more expensive than the technically equivalent, more standardized and more solidified competitor.
They are both Laserdisc 2.0 anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:3, Insightful)
If true, that is by far one of the most alarming statistics I have ever read. If large cooperations marketing has succeeded to the point that there are 10 million people that will not buy a company's product regardless of its technical merits and price point, we've reached a truly low point in society.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
I like the part where you complain about fanboyism, and then immediately start going into wild speculation about "divx-like lockdowns and timed rentals", then follow that up with complaints of "selective buyouts" that both sides were doing.
Frankly, I'm just glad the whole thing's over, so that hopefully the burners will start getting more common/cheaper.
Re:blueray hd dvd? (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
From whence comes salvation? All is quiet. (Score:4, Insightful)
Paramount and Universal will be doubly screwed now until they come to Blu-Ray - no-one will buy HD-DVD titles in any numbers to speak of, and lots of people may shy away from any SD DVD's until those studios move to Blu-Ray and produce an HD title to buy. I know I had stopped buying DVD's for over a year now, thinking that anything I liked enough to buy could wait for on HD.
Re:blueray hd dvd? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
Buying a Big Mac isn't obligatory, but when I do I pay tax on it. It still is tax.
Blu-ray comes with a significant price premium -- for both technical and licensing reasons -- over HD-DVD. Add the value of combo discs that you can get for HD-DVD, but not Blu-ray, and the average household either has to upgrade wholesale at once (have fun getting a blu-ray player for the SUV), or buy all media twice.
Blu-ray is a much more expensive proposition for exactly the same end result.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:1, Insightful)
What it comes down to is which format studios and hardware companies are most comfortable supporting. For both, I'd have to say that HD-DVD comes out on top.
Studios have very strong reasons to be weary of Sony, considering that Sony has an appalling track record of refusing to play nicely with others, and also owns a movie studio themselves. Likewise, they've got their own reputations to worry about, should Sony pull another stunt, like the rootkit fiasco. Also, look at what happened to BetaMax.
Hardware vendors also have a bit to be concerned about. Although Blu-Ray has a small technical advantage over HD-DVD (the disc holds more), the players and discs are much more expensive to produce, and royalties are higher (and paid to Sony, who is in direct competition with other vendors). This translates to smaller profit margins, and a higher price at retail (both of which are bad, if your competitor can profitably sell what is essentially the same product for 2/3 the price). Once again, sony also doesn't tend to embrace standards (even their own!), and has a reputation of not playing nicely with others. Also, look at what happened to BetaMax.
Toshiba is a rather generic consumer electronics manufacturer, whereas Sony tends to be rather high-profile (and accordingly, high-risk).
Sony has a track record, and it's absolutely appalling. Even with all the marketing and buzz, studios and hardware vendors should know better than to trust them... this is where Toshiba put their money.
Unfortunately, it seems that Sony's been practicing a bit of payola, which is something that Toshiba hadn't considered, and something that Sony's *very* good at.
Is that really true? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the process really so different that it's easier to build an entire new plant rather than retool an existing DVD plant?
Harder than HD-DVD I can understand, but assuming BRD has won the format war (especially depressing as consumers haven't really had a say yet), I find it hard to believe DVD plants will basically be gutted and replaced as they phase out and BRD phases in.
Cheaper already, and you forget about Deep Color.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Since many millions more discs have been pressed in Blu-Ray (thanks to PS3 games) the production costs have dropped substantially. And the consumer only sees movie prices which have remained identical between the two formats.
more for the drives
Sony just announced a $200 PC BD-ROM. How much are HD-DVD ROM's again? Scale shows advantage once again.
and it natively supports region locking and other consumer nightmares.
Most titles do not use the region controls, and there are fewer regions than DVD had - which means greater, not lesser, consumer acceptance of the format on region bounds.
Plus, the storage capacity of HD-DVD (the other thing commonly touted as it's inferiority) is more than plenty for 1K HD content,
Not if you also want lossless audio, or have a longer movie with a lot of detail. Then you have to make sacrifices. You've also forgotten that this is the year some systems will start to support Deep Color in HDMI 1.3, and we'll start to see movies support that as well. A greater bit-depth for color requires more space.
You go pick which is more important to you.
As an engineer it has always seemed pretty obvious to me.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:1, Insightful)
# A receptive audience in the US that is most comprised of Microsoft fans that are Xbox owners and or Windows PC gamers
# A core group of fanatics for your product that are willing to sit around in Net discussion boards 24/7/365 days a year hyping your product and trashing the Sony one
# Free marketing from sites like Slashdot and the endless Zonk anti-Sony/BluRay stories
# A wealth of bogus technical data and specs that 'prove' your product is superior to the Sony one
# A group of people who are willing to spend a huge amount of money in a short amount of time on your product and then go out on the Net and brag about attach rates and 'fastest selling' vs the Sony product
So if you are a company like Toshiba looking at early sales figures and reception to your product you can easily mistake this enthusiasm for your product for what it really is hatred of Sony. The same thing happened to Microsoft and the Xbox and once again with the 360. Dead in most of the world markets and surviving almost entirely on a core US anti-Sony group of consumers.
Toshiba is lucky HD-DVD got killed off this quick and most likely only has lost in the hundreds of millions. Microsoft is some 7 billion in the hole on the six year long Xbox marketplace disaster.
And when does that take off (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, another Microsoft cable box attempt? Are they going to give everyone a Surface table for a penny?
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Add Blu-Ray to console
2. Be a year late to market, more expensive than competition, and overall the worst selling console
3. ???
4. Dominate the HD market!
Re:War would have ended if HD-DVD shipped in Elite (Score:0, Insightful)
Bullshit. Absolute bullshit.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:3, Insightful)
The new HD-DVD meme. Not easy nor cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay attention everyone, this is the new meme that all the cool HD kids are spreading now in some kind of bizarre "Scorched Earth" strategy meant to destroy both formats, after all Sony must die right?
Well lets think about both your arguments:
1) Easier. To play HD content from a disc I just place a disc in a player, and it's playing. To get HD content online I have to decide to buy it from somewhere (and have an internet connection to my system at the TV). Then I have to wait for it to buffer enough to start watching. And then I have to watch a greatly compressed video/audio experience that makes buying a decent HD set a waste. Or I can go for a torrent, and spend days downloading a full quality mvoie only risking many thousands of dollars in fines if a torrent that I must leave up for days on end is discovered. If I downloaded the content legally and want to share it with a friend I can't do that. If I downloaded it legally I load them a hard drive (!). If I have physical media, I just loan them a disc (unless - sweet irony! I have a BD burner and they have a BD-ROM, in which case I can burn a disc).
How was that easier?
2) Cheaper. Yes free is certainly cheap, though of dubious ethical value. Online downloads? Cheap indeed but either they are (a) very cheap and the media expires shortly, or (b) actually rather expensive for the same non-portable highly compressed content I mentioned before. And in the meantime I can rent Blu-Ray discs from Netflix more cheaply than any online service, and probably get them faster than a torrent and cheaper than legal online HD media.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pissed off consumers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It ain't over till the fat lady sings... (Score:3, Insightful)
"No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting."
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:2, Insightful)
E.g. Netflix could send out disks which would become unplayable at the end of the rental period so you wouldn't need to return them. As far as I can tell the costs of producing a disk is negligable for DVD and CD and will probably become so for BlueRay and HDVD. So most of the cost is essentially an IP rights license. That implies that you could sell limited duration licenses to people for less than the perpetual one they normally get with a pressed disk.
Actually you could even imagine some sort of equivalent of Flexi singles - i.e. the disk would be manufactured to last for a short period for straight mechanical reasons. Maybe a biodegradeable disk so you can compost it when it expires. I can imagine you'd have a shelf of very cheap time limited movies (a dollar or so) at eye level near the checkouts in supermarkets. Basically the Top 10 best selling DVDs in a disposable format, designed to attract impulse buyers who only want to watch them once.
And it would be up to you whether you bought them/picked them up - I think there will always be a market for pressed disks that don't expire. In fact DIVX shows that maybe that is 100% of the market for DVDs - i.e. people won't buy things with an expiry date, regardless of cost. Mind you, you could make them wholly ad supported and bundle them with newspapers. In the UK newspapers often give away audio CDs - they pay a very small fee to the IP owner for the rights to do it. If you could convince the IP owners that they're giving away only a short license period, maybe you could give away DVDs instead.
But why worry about it? If there is market for time limited movies then you're free to ignore them. And if there isn't a market for them it isn't an issue. And it's odd that the same people who complain that 'the MAFIAA' should be innovating new delivery models rather than litigating tend to complain about things like DIVX, which is an example of them doing exactly that.
Unskippable crap... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
Doubtful. But it would certainly have subjected the 360 to the same cost and time overruns that the PS3 suffered from.
No-one would argue that much of the 360's current success is due to it launching a year earlier with a cheaper price. Making the HD disc player optional might (in the long run) make it harder for devs to squeeze large games in, but definitely kept the console cheaper and simpler for the so-crucial first couple of years of its life.
As for putting it in the Elite, its sales weren't large enough to make much difference to Toshiba, and increasing the cost would not have helped that. Armchair analysts can call it "penny pinching", but in the world of business, the user always pays in the end. Sony's decision to sacrifice their Playstation brand on the altar of Blu-Ray success has cost them dearly [variety.com], at least in the short term.
Re:War would have ended if HD-DVD shipped in Elite (Score:4, Insightful)
why would microsoft care? They came out with a cheaper console, have a lot more market share (and better games) for now, and since hd-dvd has lost I bet they will come out with a blue-ray add-on for the xbox before the end of the year. Sony bet everything on blue-ray, MS just stood on the sidelines and focused on the console and games, without caring too much about the blue-ray/hd-dvd angle, knowing that no matter who won they could come out with an external player without risking being on the losing side.
Re:Most Blu-Ray discs region free (Score:5, Insightful)
>in the UK) are region free on Blu-Ray as well.
Yes, now they are, when they are "fighting" versus HD DVD. But who knows about the future and when there is only Blu-ray?
>It's more widely understood by studios that region coding is
>not as good for sales, they only use it for regional control now.
So how come most DVD still have region coding?
Welcome to the Betamax theory of CE (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically all media come in two formats: A cheap and popular version and a marginally technically better but far more expensive version that hangs on but never holds sway. The better more expensive version always takes the lead early on because early adopters are willing to pay premium prices for quality products. Then the R&D giant behind it leverages the popularity to ramp the licensing cost at just the wrong inflection of the demand curve, driving consumers to the adequate and cheap version until you can't find content in the high quality version any more and Betamax version buyers lose all their investment in quality equipment and content.
It's easy know which version is which because Sony is almost always behind the expensive one.
SCSI, and all the iSAS evolved variants, are examples of the Betamax of hard drives. Notice you can't get one in decent capacity for any price these days?
It's like watching all the Friday the 13th sequels actually. Each time it looks like it's going to be a new movie, and then it's the same movie all over again.
good start (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The new HD-DVD meme. Not easy nor cheap. (Score:2, Insightful)
Where exactly does this magical disc appear from? Last I checked, you have to go out and buy or rent one, which means driving out to the store, hoping that they have the particular title you want (in stock or at all). Oh you use Netflix? Let's see, that's 4+ days waiting for the disc to arrive in the mail. A minute of buffering doesn't sound so bad after all.
Broadband in the US is way behind. As it stands now, the streaming video experience isn't ideal. It will improve, as will just about every other technology.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the disparity is probably more an indication of just how few people care about HD formats at the moment. Sure there's enough people to make some noise, but when a "poorly-selling" console is able to "dominate" the market it tells you that the market isn't particularly large. It also suggests that a significant number of people are getting a HD player not because they specifically want one, but because the console they've bought happens to include it.
That's not necessarily a bad marketing / sales strategy though -- if you've already got a Blu-Ray player in your house, why go out and buy an HD-DVD player just to watch HD content? It also gives you a chance to try out HD content to see if it's worth it without having to first buy a player which you might never use again.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:3, Insightful)
Despite how much I like the HD-DVD format more than Blu-Ray Toshiba really needs to just throw in the towel at this point and do the consumer market a favor...
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's only MOSTLY dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It's only MOSTLY dead. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's funny because I would personally choose HD DVD if I were to judge by names. It gives the impression of being just another rock solid format like CD-R or DVD-RW.
Blu-ray, on the other hand, sounds like just another marketing invention, without any serious consideration of the implications of its widespread usage, etc.
Re:Toshiba should avenge the HD-DVD by reinventing (Score:2, Insightful)
If they remove DRM, not a single Hollywood studio will release on the format. It's that simple.
Re:It's only MOSTLY dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then sitting lonely on a shelf is a Toshiba HD-E1 'HDDVD Player' at £200 - 5 times the cost of all the others - and nobody buys because they assume it's more of the same.
OTOH Bluray is clearly different, so people are more likely to ask questions and consider it to be something different.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:3, Insightful)
Then theres also just really huge(as in span) games like the Final Fantasy series. Up the graphics, multiply it by game length..
Demographics (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this format war belongs to the 35+ demographic. I was talking with a couple tech savy neighbourhood kids to get a feel for where they were at. Their response? "You buy that shit? Why don't you just download it, that's what we do." They're bypassing this entire nightmare.
$1000 players, $500 HDCP strippers, format "A" vs. format "B", cables, plugs... ad nausium. The generation that matters in the next 10 years are laughing at us 'old' people. They could care less about physical media when on-line on-demand is available.
The warranties haven't even expired on some of these HD-DVD boxes people spent a lot of money on and the format has already been declared dead. My age group is the last generation used to "owning" physical media. For us the format matters. Remove the media as in download on demand, whatever the source, and none of this matters.
I'll wait for several reasons. Least of which, is that either format is moot as is DRM so long as the direction is toward downloading. Cable has on demand viewing, Netflix has started the same thing. I don't think the next 5-10 years is going to be about physical media. Corporations are still battling over a format when it's replacement is available and in use. Things are moving quicker then they have in the past. I declare both formats dead or at least very temporary.
-[d]-
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft has chosen to back HD-DVD, and there is supposed to be an HD-DVD player add on for the Xbox 360. But because it is an add on, there is not a great deal of incentive to buy it.
END COMMUNICATION
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's the real scoop: Bluray and HDDVD are equivalent from a consumer picture standpoint. There is no effective difference in the quality of the material presented to the consumer. Where they differ greatly is in consumer restrictions, with HDDVD having many fewer restrictions compared to Bluray, and also being far more stable than Bluray. I'm sure we've all heard the reports of the problems of BD/BD+ and playability on players? I wouldn't touch a BD player until there's a guarantee it will play all BD discs, without me having to do squat. Yes, I'm aware that HDDVD also "requires" updates, but so far, in 23 discs, not a single update has been required. BD encourages updates, HDDVD does not.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:3, Insightful)
It is also more expensive because, outside of the PS3, hardware manufacturers aren't subsidizing Blu-Ray. Toshiba has been selling HD DVD players at a loss for some time now. In essence, they were dumping them. And THAT is why they are just about the only ones making HD DVD players. Technology needs to drop in price naturally. There is NO incentive for hardware companies to sell disc players at a loss, as they don't get royalties on the back end like Toshiba does. Toshy squeezed out any chance of real competition on the player front by counting on money from royalties. The other cost differences between Blu-Ray and HD DVD are pretty much insignificant at this point.
Add the value of combo discs that you can get for HD-DVD
Most of the people I've encountered that had HD DVD players HATED the combo discs. They were noticeably more expensive than their Blu-Ray counterparts (when the same title was available on both).
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's only MOSTLY dead. (Score:5, Insightful)
Good to see that conventional "wisdom" is as useless as ever.
Re:Toshiba Fell Victim To The Xbox Demographic (Score:3, Insightful)
Spoken like a true frothing-from-the-mouth Microsoft fanboy.
Sony has only "pushed" Blu-ray onto the PS3. Some may argue it was needed for the betterment of next-gen games.
Sony has allowed the PS3 users to incorporate standard hard drives, headsets, USB keyboards, Linux onto their system. No root-kitting involved whatsoever.
Were you talking about another product? If so, then it's off-topic, because as we know, Microsoft has done way more harm in forcing proprietary formats and software onto Windows.
Not only that, but they've set some harmful precedents that you fanboys seem to blindingly accept:
- multiple concurrent versions of consoles
- paying for online play
- an unacceptable rate of failure
- tying the console to the Windows platform
If you really "hate it when the bad guys go long and win big", then you should not be rooting for Microsoft.
Re:As an HD-DVD developer... (Score:2, Insightful)
And this:
Note that I have not actually seen a Blu-Ray disc play,
Followed by this:
any Blu-Ray player other than the PS3 is slow as hell with simple menu animations. By "slow as hell", I mean you will actually see it redrawing each frame in blocks, for a tiny menu taking up maybe an eighth of the screen.
Just desroys your credibility, sorry.
Java runs quite happily on a cheap mobile phone these days, I don't think for a second that anything that can decrypt HD video on the fly isn't going to ave the power to run a little java on the side. So when you say:
"The menus aren't really going to be much more than standard DVD menus."
You're talking out of your arse. And as for region coding, whilst the early versions of the standard don't support it, it was certainly being worked on [reghardware.co.uk].
You can also put BluRay on DVD [wikipedia.org] using the AVCREC format, much like the HD-REC format for HD-DVD.
HD-DVD has been moving on to things like "Managed Copy", which is designed to allow (for example) legally ripping a movie to your iPod
That's part of AACS but was not included in the first version due to Toshiba (yes, the HD-DVD backer, Toshiba) requesting an interim standard because the main one was taking so long. So it looks like older HD-DVD discs and players likely didn't support that either, and going forward BluRay probably will.
Now, I'm not saying BluRay was the vastly superior format, but I am saying that HD-DVD was not all you've said here, and BluRay does have some advantages in capacity and throughput.
Re:Unskippable crap... (Score:3, Insightful)
You're doing something SERIOUSLY wrong then. Movies don't usually come in executable format, you know.