Toshiba Officially Kills HD-DVD
From over at Homotron: As rumoured earlier, Toshiba, the architects behind HD-DVD and technology owner, has just put out a press release proclaiming they are indeed ceasing production on all HD-DVD products:
TOKYO--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.
That's means it's official folks: the fat lady has sung. HD-DVD is no more.
The press release showed up today just after market close in Tokyo. Hit the jump for the full release.
Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD DVD Businesses [Toshiba]
TOKYO--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.HD DVD was developed to offer consumers access at an affordable price to high-quality, high definition content and prepare them for the digital convergence of tomorrow where the fusion of consumer electronics and IT will continue to progress.
"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," said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. "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."
Toshiba will continue to lead innovation, in a wide range of technologies that will drive mass market access to high definition content. These include high capacity NAND flash memory, small form factor hard disk drives, next generation CPUs, visual processing, and wireless and encryption technologies. The company expects to make forthcoming announcements around strategic progress in these convergence technologies.
Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe, yet will continue to make efforts to meet customer requirements. The company will continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives within the overall PC business relative to future market demand.
This decision will not impact on Toshiba's commitment to standard DVD, and the company will continue to market conventional DVD players and recorders. Toshiba intends to continue to contribute to the development of the DVD industry, as a member of the DVD Forum, an international organization with some 200 member companies, committed to the discussion and defining of optimum optical disc formats for the consumer and the related industries.
Toshiba also intends to maintain collaborative relations with the companies who joined with Toshiba in working to build up the HD DVD market, including Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and DreamWorks Animation and major Japanese and European content providers on the entertainment side, as well as leaders in the IT industry, including Microsoft, Intel, and HP. Toshiba will study possible collaboration with these companies for future business opportunities, utilizing the many assets generated through the development of HD DVD.
Den Den Boy
Posted to Hot Stuff, Movies-DVDs on 19 February 2008
· Comments (8)
Other stuff like this: dead, HD-DVD, Toshiba
Thank god, the stupid useless format war is over, and the superior product won.
Blu-Ray is marketing fluff, studio collusion, and a consumer rip-off. HD-DVD's PIP, internet content, wicked superior upconversion of standard DVD's... I'm going to be using my HD-A35 for a long time to come.
I'll skip Blu-Ray while saving lots of money on standard DVD and downloading HD.
... the PIP is so sweet on the Bourne flicks and the Matrix movies...
*plays trumpets*
*makes a moment of silence*
*Puts in pirate of the Caribbean in the blue ray player*
Well what! It's better!
Yay! I don't really care about HD format per se, but I'm very glad that I'm going to be burning my backups to x-box huge blu-ray discs in 5 years when burners are cheap, and not the somewhat smaller HD DVD.
Thank. god. this is over.
I'll have my Paramount and Universal Blu-ray flicks now, please.
One format to rule them all.
In the end, I just can't help but feel that the whole concept of "consumers making the choice" was a mere illusion. Retails basically made the choice for me.
For me, the death of this format carried the same sting I got watching that E3 conference online a few years back when Sega made their announcement they were canceling the Dreamcast.
Right now, I find it silly to even consider selling off my collection of disks. It was to me a great format, fit my budget just perfectly and I got a great collection of flicks that look especially great on the living room tv. I knew the risks of investing in this format and do not regret it. All this means is that now I'll have an even cheaper variety of disks I can pick up as I just do not in any way see Blu-Ray dropping it's price now that it's primary competition is gone.
Keep in mind that I also have access to Blu-Ray with the PS3 I picked up around Christmas, but I did not buy it primarily for that. The free Spiderman 3 disk was a interesting look into the format. The movie looks great, but the story was poor so that probably isn't going to be my best intoduction to the Blu-Ray format. I'm a gamer first and a movie buff second, but so far I'm beginning to regret my purchase of this shiny black monolith since I'm still waiting for something truly worthwhile on it. Metal Gear Cutscenes....er.. Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy just do not interest me and I've gotten far more out of my 360 and Wii. I was even hoping that I could take advantage of the PS3's so called use of Linux in order to use it as a linux media center, but was only dissapointed even more to find out that use of it's GPU was blocked. Sure the 360 and PS3 all have media center capabilities, but I do not appreciate the limits and restrictions set upon them. It's flat out embarassing that my old modified Xbox 1 with Xbox Media Center outperforms them all when it comes to formats and functions.
I'm sure there's quite a lot of people out there happy with this announcement, especially PS3 owners who now feel vindicated for their purchase, but try to at least be sensitive of the fact that there's a lot of people that are going to have to rethink their high def solutions right now. The vitriol I see on many web forums and even in the general public really puts me off from even considering purchasing any blu-ray disks. You'd think HD-DVD shot their dog and raped their kid! :)
This will probably seem like sour grapes to a lot of people, but I don't think I'll bother with any of this for a while. I admit that I had been taking advantage of Live Marketplace downloads and even other online options as well for my HD fix so I may settle with that route since it's availiable to me.
Your reasoning was all over the place, so yeah, it seems like sour grapes.
You'll pick up a Blu Ray player later on, odds are, since now that they don't have to push it as a viable format, they can afford to bring it down to a more affordable level.
Apple TV is starting to look better and better. So basically the PS3 is still the best bluray player..what a joke.