Toshiba is about to say farewell to HD DVD after a long hard battle. HD DVD was originally developed and designed to be the successor to regular DVDs, and they officially launched in the United States back on April 18, 2006. Their biggest problem all along has been Sony’s Blu-ray, their direct competitor which launched a few months after they did. The battle between the two has been a fierce one and both had their allies for quite some time. It seems as though the biggest shift came in January right before CES and then it quickly went downhill from there.
Toshiba hasn’t officially announced their decision to end HD DVD, but sources inside the company say it’s coming. Reuters reports that someone at Toshiba told them anonymously that they have “entered the final stage of planning to make our exit from the next generation DVD business.” The formal announcement is expected next week. This news has some people celebrating because finally, the format war (which has been compared to the Betamax-VHS battle of the 80s) is over. Others aren’t too happy because they invested money in HD DVD players as well as movies and at this point, those players will be about useless.
Over the last several months, there has been a lot in the news regarding the battle. At different points, it looked like HD DVD was on top. At other times, Blu-ray looked like it was the winner. Let’s take a look:
- Blockbuster lends support to Blu-ray (6-18-2007)
- Five Free Blu-ray Movies with Blu-ray Player Purchase (6-29-2007)
- Five Free Movies with Xbox HD DVD Player (7-26-2007)
- Paramount Chooses HD DVD Over Blu-ray (8-21-2007)
- Warner Brothers Says Adios to HD DVD (1-7-2008)
- Blu-ray Destined to be the HD Winner? (1-10-2008)
- Netflix Dumping HD DVD too? (2-11-2008)
- HD DVD… Another One Bites the Dust (2-15-2008)
It’s nice that there’s finally a clear winner, but we don’t believe Blu-ray is set to take-off like crazy. DVDs are still the preferred choice by the majority of people because they are more affordable. Blu-ray players are much more expensive, not to mention the Blu-ray discs themselves are pricier than regular DVDs. It’ll definitely take some time before Blu-ray is able to convince the masses to spend the money upgrading to a new player and new movies.
Rest in peace HD DVD.
Blu-ray (lowercase r
) is the superior format mostly because of capacity. A dual-layer Blu-ray disc can hold up to 50GB of data while an HD DVD dual-layer disc can hold up to 30GB. Studio and retailer support didn’t hurt Blu-ray either, but I’m just glad that this format war is going to be over quite soon so the fence-sitting consumers will be able to adopt HD media. And to all those people who said Sony putting a Blu-ray player into the PS3 was a dumb idea, when will Sony get their deserved props? 
HD DVD players will not be useless. They make great up-converters for standard DVDs and they will still play HD DVD movies that the owners have already bought.
I was kinda pulling for HD DVD, mainly due to price. Whatever, I guess it’s good that the war is finally over. It’ll still be a long while before I adopt (I still use VHS if I record TV).
Can’t wait to pick up my HD-DVD player, there on ebay for like 50 bucks now!
Here I was just pointing out to Ryan that he goofed on one of his articles and it was HD DVD and not HD-DVD. Then I go and goof up Blu-ray. My bad!
It’ll still be a while before I adopt as well, and I’m positive we’re not the minority. Sony has a long ways to go before Blu-ray takes over the popularity of regular DVD.
I suspect that now Sony will sell more PS3’s because it is a decent Blu-ray player and the added benefit of a console game system.
I bought my PS3 over the weekend and I tested it with my Iomega 160GB USB 20 external hard drive to see how it handled it and some multimedia files and photos. It handled them all except for the multimedia files that the system did not support.
The only quirk was with the menu system as when you select the USB device when it shows up, you would expect to see the files. However, it said there were no files present. What you have to do is press the “triangle” button to get the options menu and then select display all.
Glad to see that you picked up a PS3… you’ll have to let us know how you like it sometime.
So far I am loving it, specifically as a Blu-ray player and for playing DIVX video files. I am now looking into streaming them from my computer. A friend that has a PS3 says it can be done with Media Player 11 and he is going to be sending me some information with screen shots.
I still need to spend more time playing games on it, specifically Time Crisis 4.