Toshiba To Halt HD-DVD Production 494
Multiple users have written to tell us that Toshiba is planning to halt production of devices related to HD-DVD. According to Japanese broadcasting network NHK, Toshiba will lose "hundreds of millions of dollars" as the format war finally draws to a close. Regardless, investors are pleased that Toshiba has made the decision to cut its losses. This comes after a last-ditch price cut was unable to prevent Wal-mart from throwing their lot in with Blu-ray, although some sources suggest that Wal-mart was already aware of Toshiba's plans to withdraw from fight.
now if they'll only (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Insightful)
10 More Years of Region Locked Movies (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that people conflate competition and competing formats? There was more competition in the Blu-Ray camp than there was in the HD DVD camp. Toshiba was dumping players, but there was still no real competition, Toshiba was the only (real) manufacturer. You can have competition when there is a single standard, no problem. There is, for example, competition in the DVD business, always has been. Are there more than one DVD format? Did the DivX fiasco add value for the consumer?
The format war would have made sure we had continued high prices for a long time to come since the war it self slowed down adoption. With slow adoption both consumers and producers will tend to do a lot of fence sitting, and that is not good for anybody since it takes longer to get to the benefits of economics of scale. Everybody but pirates benefits from this war being over.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Better luck next time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sony won a format war... (Score:5, Insightful)
This might explain why it didn't fail. Companies prefer it when the standards body isn't the same organisation as their rival. There's always a risk that the standard might change specifically to favour one manufacturer.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Insightful)
90%+ of average consumers don't have any clue whatsoever what "VHS" stands for, and couldn't care less.
For that matter, most consumers couldn't tell you what "HD" stands for either.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case there was competition between the formats not only in which format was "better" in terms of storage quality (not to mention archival, access speed and other properties) but also even if one format was clearly superior which was better in terms of price and availability.
I don't think having both formats around was hurting anything as both are still in early adoption phases, most users don't have Blu-Ray or HD DVD yet and a large portion perhaps even a majority don't have the capabilities to use such formats (at least in the new abilities they provide) yet over the older standard.
I still see this as a bad thing and perhaps the "wars" are not over at all as Hard Drives, Flash drives and other storage options are coming down in price and are able to offer similar amounts of storage. The real contender in these "wars" as I see it could be download bandwidth rather than delivery of a physical piece of media.
In the end these media wars are good for the consumer. Take CDs for example, a format that won with relatively little competition. The way things are sold to consumers is that the new format is more expensive at first but as it takes hold and becomes dominant is prices drop to match the old cost with a margin determined by the cost of production. Music CDs are still fairly expensive and have not come down (as I believe) to a price comparable to that of Cassettes even though the older format has been more-or-less out of the market for several years now.
For Formats it is difficult to raise prices on consumers as there is an expectation that the prices will fall over time and consumers will need a reason to pay more with the information on the format primarily being a luxury good. However that expectation works both ways as consumers expect that two items of the same format will cost about the same on average.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more like a product trademark to me: you don't complain that the word Panasonic is 'better' than say Toshiba, just because Panasonic literally means pro-sound and Toshiba is a compound noun where To- means Tokyo, and what -shiba is I forgot. But that doesn't still make Panasonic any 'better'.
Who says they have won anything yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Insightful)
Digital Versatile Disc is a backronym - DVD originally meant Digital Video Disc, until they realized how stupid the name actually was ("Yeah, this game is distributed on a video disc. But it's not really a video..."), at which point they just redefined the abbreviation. When I think about it, I realize that HD-DVD's name is just as stupid: you can have just as High Definition audio/video or interactive media on HD discs as you can on "SD discs", just not as much.
By not having a meaning, blu-ray avoids that problem - a blu-ray disc is a disc that uses blue rays.
I do think that CD is a good name - it tells me what it is (a disc that's quite small, compared to LP's), not what they developed it to contain. But CDSDWEMRFDTDVD (Compact Disc-sized Disc With Even More Room For Data Than Digital Versatile Discs) doesn't have such a nice ring to it... Of course, today it's more of a Big Disc, compared to Minidisc or mini-DVD, which again shows that neutral names are better.
To finish off, let me just counter your "glory days" argument by saying "BetaMax" and "Video2000".
BD-R Prices (Score:3, Insightful)
I figure my BD-R threshold is about $5 per disk. Presently they seem to be going for $15-$22 per disk. I'll be willing to buy a BD-R reader/burner when 25GB single layer BD-R's are at $5, which interestingly is the price of CD-Rs when I finally decided to make the switch from floppies in 1996. That was a 450 fold increase in media size. CD-R to DVD-R was a 6 fold increase. I'll be content with another 6 fold increase.
Hopefully BD/BD-R support for MythTV will be available by then.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:4, Insightful)
Although it would make crossing the borders interesting.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Better luck next time (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm simply not naive enough to believe that you can have the good products without healthy competition. If your product is "good enough" for consumers and you're the only supplier, where's your motivation to innovate or improve?
Fail... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about this, every studio comes up with their own format! That way, there's tons of choices for the consumer! Want to watch a Univeral or Paramount movie? You have to buy a special player to play their formats. Think of the possibilities! Think of the competition! Think of the illegal downloads because no one would want to put up with that bullshit!
I think your analogy needs work.
Re:10 More Years of Region Locked Movies (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution here is to set sane release dates for stuff (both in cinema and on disc) instead of locking out your customers (also, there are a lot of suggestions that region coding is an illegal restriction on free trade... shame no one's sued the studios yet).
Honestly, if you release stuff in one country before another, you really can't complain when people take it upon themselves to import it (through legal or illegal means).
Re:PS3 Success? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who thinks this wasn't part of the strategic play for Sony and that having the cheapest Blu-Ray player on the market won't help PS3 sales is looking at this from a purely gaming perspective.
Wii remains the family console, Sony is now the HD player and the "pretty" graphics console option.
The biggest question is now where this leaves XBox as it is in a real bind as to how quickly they role out a Blu-Ray player extension to stop people buying the PS3 to get Blu-Ray and whether they release a new XBox 360-HD edition that has Blu-Ray baked in.
Betamax wins! (Score:3, Insightful)
I own an HD-DVD player - but the Blue-Ray *disk* format is superior and more extensible than the HD-DVD disk. Blue-ray will increase in capacity with time, as it was designed to do. HD-DVD didn't really have this in mind it was for the most part, easier to implement and designed specifically for carrying HD video content. Blue-ray carries with it an entire execution environment within the player - one of the reasons for the difficulty that vendors have had complying with the specification.
Note that the disk format has nothing at all to do with the content format. Almost all HD-DVD's contain SMPTE VC-1 content, but there is a mix of VC-1 and H.264 within Blue-ray disks. Blue-ray and hd-dvd are capable of playing other stream types.
The "Blue-ray" logo really represents just a particular disk format and a player that has a certain set of capabilities.
Glad to see the non-noob tech prevail.
Re:10 More Years of Region Locked Movies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:10 More Years of Region Locked Movies (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Where Does This Leave the Xbox? (Score:3, Insightful)
When you say 'obsolete' drive, are you talking about the built in DVD, which they chose for the data speeds (allowing, for example Devil May Cry 4 to be as fast to load as it is on the PS3, which has a *20+ minute install routine* or are you talking about the external and optional HD-DVD drive?
If HD-DVD truly is no longer being produced, we'll see an external Blu-Ray drive for the 360 before year's end. Knowing Microsoft, it's been ready for mass-production for at least a year.
HD TV Still On The Sidelines (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Blu-ray Disc Association is slightly bigger (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft shows us daily that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sony, by contrast, is just plain evil.
Re:Thanks for the misinformation Sony fanboy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Better luck next time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Its peace in our time! (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, a massive screen sitting plainly in your living room makes you look like a tool the way owning a European sports car does.
Re:10 More Years of Region Locked Movies (Score:3, Insightful)
The PS3 is only region encoded for DVDs and PS2 games.
Seeing as Region 1 and Region 2 aren't the Blu-ray regions, I'll have to ask where the discs and PS3 are from?
For example, if by Region 1, you mean USA and by Region 2, you mean Japan, be aware that those two areas are now in the same region, for Blu-ray (Region A). The region coding can be found at Wiki [wikipedia.org]. Believe me, it wouldn't fly for the PS3 to not enforce region coding on Blu-ray.
The other thing to keep in mind that not all studios are using region coding.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:3, Insightful)
Frequently? never heard that before - sounds like product bashing from the HD-DVD fanboys.
Re:Better luck next time (Score:3, Insightful)
And if you'll recall, every time someone has tried anything like this, it's always either been hideously easy to crack or it's been a compatibility nightmare that backfires. Retrofitting a completely different DRM scheme onto an existing format is almost impossible for these two reasons.
So, to use your example, once BD+ is cracked (and it will be, and the crack will become widespread just like DeCSS), Sony can either do minor revisions of BD+ (which will again get cracked) and retain compatibility with the millions of existing player, or Sony could completely revamp BD+ (BD++?) and break all existing players. Obviously the latter is an untenable position.
Now, Blu-ray players do have the "advantage" of allowing firmware upgrades to "support" newer encryption schemes. However, Sony cannot overuse this idea. Consumers are used to their stuff just working. Having to frequently update your player every time somebody cracks Sony's encryption just isn't practical in the long run. Consumers will rebel, or there will be a massive negative PR backlash. If Sony wants to drive customers to downloaded content, this is the surest way to do it, and they know that.
DRM will continue to be an annoyance in the short-term, but nothing more. Real pirates (China-based mass duplicators) will continue to bypass it. P2P will get around it. In the end, it will be no more effective or annoying than DeCSS.
One thing to note: there is a very beneficial side-effect to the end of the format war. The more players that are sold, the more difficult it will be for Sony to make the alterations you're so afraid of. Now that HD-DVD is dead, Blu-ray sales should pick up all that slack, effectively doubling its adoption rate. Regardless of what you think of Sony and its policies, mass adoption of its hardware locks Sony into a format. This is a Good Thing(tm), as we have all the time in the world to crack it.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:5, Insightful)
Betacam, Betacam SP, DigiBeta and the newer HD versions are THE standard in the video industry. Even the Betacam SP, now 20 years old at least, is very widly used and still hasn't been fully replaced by the newer digital versions, even in the "Western" video world.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because they're right. VHS has been Video Home System [wikipedia.org] for decades, probably since its consumer launch (and certainly at least soon afterward).
The engineers might have called it "vertical helical scan", but it wasn't ever widely marketed that way.
Erm, that means the acronym actually stands for "vertical helical scan" my friend. Making up a new meaning for an acronym doesn't change its original meaning. Hence the term used by the OP "backronym" - an explanation that won't scare the neophytes who purchase the technology.
Re:whew, fewer syllables (Score:4, Insightful)
It also doesn't make the original meaning "more correct", except for people who want to sound smart at parties.
That's not really appropriate here. Since VHS was never known as anything other than Video Home System to the world at large, you can't really claim that it's wrong. At the very least, you could say that both are correct.