The Death of HD-DVD

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Well I was expecting format war that would never end but it seems that now Toshiba has pulled the plug on HD-DVD and Sony has won with Blu-Ray.

Just a few months ago it seemed that there would be plenty of competition between the Microsoft-Toshiba backed HD-DVD having it bundled as an addon to Xbox 360. The porn industry got a bit of press with their backing of the spec and there was word that cheap players were coming down the pipe. At the same time Sony was having a hard time winning the game console war with the new Playstation 3 against the Wii and Xbox 360 but the battle continued.

Over the last couple of months the press seemed to be pushing Blu-Ray but in my mind the cheap HD-DVD players on the market as well as WalMart selling only standalone HD-DVD seemed like enough that the major studios would have to go with the HD-DVD over Blu-Ray, but strangly a couple of studios mainly Warner last month went to Blu-Ray and everyone said that blu-Ray had won.

Nothing had changed over the last month and then last week there were a spate of announcements that in just a couple of days killed any chance for HD-DVD.

First NetFlix said they would go Blu-Ray by the end of the year
Best Buy said they would go Blu-Ray by the end of May
Walmart said they would sell only BluRay

And then there were rumors that Toshiba was going to pull the plug on the manufacture of HD-DVD drives. Rumor is enough to kill a technology and today HD-DVD is dead.

I am pretty happy actually that there is a decisive sinner in the HD disk market. There was a combo dirve planned a couple of months ago that was going to keep both formats alive but really why would we want two formats. I have not seen anything that tells me that one format is better then another, this is no Beta vs VHS part two and the support of two formats is not going to help anyone, manufacturers, studios or consumers so good news that a standard is here that everyone can coalesce around and offer cheaper media and Cheaper players. Also hopefully we will see more and more features as we have seen with DVD players over the last few years supporting MP3 and DivX.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 9:04 am and is filed under DVD, Home Theater News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.