Toshiba’s HD DVD device halt least-surprising tech announcement since iPhone price cut
Toshiba waved the white flag in the high definition format war vs. Blu-ray this morning, officially announcing that it will no longer make or market high definition HD DVD players or recorders.
The widely anticipated move (see “Because it would be foolish to keep fighting a costly, divisive, unwinnable war”) comes in the aftermath of last month’s decision by several major movie studios to release films only in the Blu-ray format.
“That had tremendous impact,” Toshiba Corp. President Atsutoshi Nishida said. “If we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win.”
Before you rush out to buy that Blu-ray player, you might want to consider whether the Blu-ray standard itself is settled. Or whether you should bother with a physical disc player at all.
I wonder if Toshiba or any of the retailers selling the HD-DVD players would consider some sort of compensation for this decision. Just this Christmas I broke down and bought the HD-DVD. I knew there was a risk of one of the formats going away but I figured it was a toss-up which one it would be at that point and never ever considered it would happen so soon and so completely final! If it had been a year or more that I was able to enjoy my investment; I wouldn’t be so frustrated but this is ridiculous.
Why did Toshiba roll over and die? Did Sony have that much leverage – and how did they get it? Money???? Okay, that’s probably a rhetorical question.
Anyway, I’m bummed…
I intend to stick to standard definition DVD for the forseeable future. With Blu-ray players costing about 10 times as much as regular DVD players and Blu-ray being basically out of the question as a format for home recording at this time, I think that the vast majority of people should just stick to regular DVD.
Huh? The iPhone cut was totally unexpected. Whereas HD-DVD demise was highly anticipated.