HD-DVD pronounced dead; film at 11

[unixronin]

The high-definition DVD format war is over.  The New York Times declared HD-DVD dead on Saturday after Wal-mart announced it would carry only Blu-Ray once its current stock of HD-DVD products is sold.  This morning, Toshiba, who developed HD-DVD, announced that Toshiba will cease production of HD-DVD equipment, and terminate all HD-DVD operastions by the end of March.

Though the latest development is a huge setback, Mr. Nishida said Toshiba was still committed to electronics and it planned to rethink its vision for the business.  In a hint of the direction the company might take, he said Toshiba might think about its role in the online video-downloading market more seriously.  Toshiba has no plans to start selling Blu-ray players, he said.

[...]

Though HD DVD's defeat will clear up much of the confusion over high-definition DVDs among consumers, analysts say consumer electronics makers will now have to convince consumers that the crisper images on Blu-ray players are worth upgrading to.  And companies like Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic products, which had joined together to fight HD DVD will now be competing in earnest with each other.

Emphasis on the last sentence mine.  Watch for a serious price war on Blu-Ray players and recorders, coming soon to electronics stores near you.

This is bad for Toshiba, but good for consumers.  Blu-Ray was clearly the superior format from the very start; many of the design decisions in HD-DVD were driven by the desire for the cheapest possible switchover from SD to HD disc mastering and pressing, rather than any actual technical superiority.

(WSJ article is restricted; full text appears below)

TOKYO -- Blaming the loss of support from a key movie studio, Toshiba Corp. said it is pulling out of the HD DVD business, handing victory to Sony Corp.'s Blu-ray technology in the fierce format war over high-definition DVDs.

Toshiba said Tuesday that it would cease production of its HD DVD players and recorders immediately and close out the business by the end of March.

"It was a heartbreaking decision, but we considered the impact of continuing the business on our earnings, the next-generation DVD market and consumers," said Toshiba Chief Executive Atsutoshi Nishida at a news conference.  He later added that he realized there was no chance of winning the battle, particularly after Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., a longtime Toshiba partner, made a pivotal decision last month to side with Blu-ray.  Since then, retailers from Best Buy Co. to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have all thrown their weight behind Blu-ray.

Though such swift decisions are rare for a Japanese company, especially when corporate pride is at stake, and analysts had assumed Toshiba would let the business fade out quietly, Mr. Nishida said the company felt it was important to read the market environment and take action quickly.

Under the same reasoning, Mr. Nishida simultaneously announced plans to strengthen its flash memory business by investing more than ¥1.7 trillion ($15.85 billion) along with its U.S. partner SanDisk Corp. to construct two new plants in Japan.  Flash memory is a chip that is typically found in digital cameras and music players, but computer makers are slowly starting to replace hard-disk drives with them because it would slash boot-up times and make laptops lighter.  The chip is still too expensive to be used widely in computers, but the continuing price decline could increase demand.

Investors have so far welcomed Toshiba's decision, pushing its shares up 5% to ¥784 on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, since last weekend, when news first broke that the company was planning to pull out of HD DVD.

The HD DVD business was a gamble for the company, which had hoped to increase its relatively small presence in the consumer electronics industry by winning the high-definition DVD war.  It had planned on making consumer electronics one of its main pillars of growth in addition to its semiconductor and nuclear reactor business.

Toshiba said about one million HD DVD players have been sold globally, including players that can be attached to Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 videogame console.  But that was still far short of Blu-ray's 6.3 million players, according to the Blu-ray Disc Association.  That figure includes Sony's PlayStation 3 videogame console which can double as a player.

Though the latest development is a huge setback, Mr. Nishida said Toshiba was still committed to electronics and it planned to rethink its vision for the business.  In a hint of the direction the company might take, he said Toshiba might think about its role in the online video-downloading market more seriously.  Toshiba has no plans to start selling Blu-ray players, he said.

Winning the format war is a major coup for Sony, which is still burdened by painful memories of its Betamax technology's loss to the VHS videocassette in the 1980s.  It is also important for the company because it is trying to shift its emphasis to the innovation of new technologies as it finishes up a three-year restructuring plan.

But Toshiba will be leaving Sony and its other Blu-ray partners with a much tougher business in the aftermath of the heated multiyear battle.  Especially over the past several months, Toshiba had been aggressively cutting prices on its HD DVD players and offering free movies with it in the hopes of luring more consumers.  That has forced Blu-ray manufacturers to lower their prices as well, a move that has cut into profits faster than expected.

Analysts believe that one of the reasons why Toshiba decided to withdraw from the business was that the market had become much less attractive than it had initially thought.

Though HD DVD's defeat will clear up much of the confusion over high-definition DVDs among consumers, analysts say consumer electronics makers will now have to convince consumers that the crisper images on Blu-ray players are worth upgrading to.  And companies like Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic products, which had joined together to fight HD DVD will now be competing in earnest with each other.

Comments

[arasirsul.livejournal.com]

Blu-Ray was clearly the superior format from the very start;

Clearly? I don't believe that word means what you think it means.

HD-DVD boasted sufficient capacity to fit four or five hours of video at 1080p resolution, and the spec was expandable to three or more layers should more space be necessary, it was cheaper to produce, didn't require a separate laser under the hood for backward compatibility to DVD... Seems to me there's a few points in HD-DVD's favor.

There's also useless trivia, like the fact that HD-DVD players ran Open Source software (GPL'd, specifically), and had a freer stance on DRM (as a ferinstance, the HD-DVD spec requires a disc support managed copy, where Blu-ray merely supported the concept). But those sorts of things have never been important to you. :)

Blu-ray was CLEARLY superior? Not so much.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

HD-DVD boasted sufficient capacity to fit four or five hours of video at 1080p resolution, and the spec was expandable to three or more layers should more space be necessary, it was cheaper to produce, didn't require a separate laser under the hood for backward compatibility to DVD... Seems to me there's a few points in HD-DVD's favor.

Then again, there's the fact that Blu-Ray has approaching twice the native capacity, and that HD recordable and rewriteable discs (last time I knew, at least) had less than half the capacity of even factory-pressed HD discs. There's the issue that while the spec is expandable to three or four layers, they'd never (to my knowledge) demonstrated the ability to actually successfully do it, and that if they could do it with HD, Sony could undoubtedly figure out a way to do it with Blu-Ray. There's the fact that the HD-DVD spec allows for a maximum transfer rate of 72Mbit/s, while the Blu-Ray spec includes transfer rates up to 216Mbit/s, theoretically extensible to double that. Blu-Ray also beats HD-DVD on bandwidth (48Mbit/s vs. 30Mbit/s for HD-DVD.) Many of these limitations of HD-DVD exist because the Blu-Ray consortium built a new technology around the capabilities afforded by 405nm "blue" lasers (actually blue-violet), while HD-DVD tried to match it as best they could by stretching 650nm red-laser technology to its limit. This decision wasn't taken to be able to offer lower costs to the consumer, though; it was to enable manufacturers to convert more cheaply to producing the new format.

Granted, Blu-Ray's "theoretical" 432Mbit/s capability is vaporware at present; it's claimed as a capability in the spec, but hasn't actually been demonstrated. But exactly the same can be said of three- and four-layer HD discs.

Yeah, Sony has DRM built into the platform. But that's not a necessary part of the technical spec. Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray use AACS, which has been as completely cracked as DVD-CSS — actual "pirates" can break new AACS keys faster than the studios can issue them. (Granted, BD+ and the BD-ROM Mark are a tougher problem. But I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before they, too, are defeated.) There's no technical reason why it has to be there, and no technical reason I'm aware of why someone can't build a Blu-Ray player that runs GPL'd software. Those aren't issues of the technology, they're issues of the implementation.

(Which is not to say that they're good, or to be ignored. Just that they don't mean the technical design itself is bad. CD did not suddenly become a worse technology the day Sony thought of putting rootkits on audio CDs. Sony just sucked harder. ...Or then again, maybe just more visibly.)


So yeah, I stand behind my statement (though I'll clarify my intent): The Blu-Ray technology is clearly superior to the HD-DVD technology. It's unfortunate that it comes from a company with such institutionalized asshattery as Sony, with all that implies.

maybe i'm paranoid, but...

[bratling.livejournal.com]

just chiming in:

"...rather than any actual technical superiority."

one area in which HD-DVD is clearly superior: durability. HD-DVD's data layer is the same distance from the bottom surface as a DVD's, but Blu-Ray is a faction of a millimeter. manufacturers have developed tough anti-scratch coatings they spray onto the bottom of BD discs, but i still can't help but be concerned that BD discs are more vulnerable to damage.

Sony and the other movie studios, i'm sure, would love that. If BD discs wore out like VHS tapes did, they could get back to the business of selling us replacement copies, making a royalty every time.

Re: maybe i'm paranoid, but...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

There is that, true. Time will tell whether the hard-coating turns out to be more durable than the deeper data layer. Audio CDs effectively have their data layer 1.2mm deep, twice as deep as HD-DVD discs (it's on the top surface of the polycarbonate layer), and they're not scratchproof.

Re: maybe i'm paranoid, but...

[bratling.livejournal.com]

not scratch-proof, but generally repairable. the scratches can be filled with filler of the same index of refraction and polished flat. the data layer is safe.

BD, the data layer itself will get damaged.

we'll see, i guess. :-/

Re: maybe i'm paranoid, but...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

not scratch-proof, but generally repairable. the scratches can be filled with filler of the same index of refraction and polished flat. the data layer is safe.

Do you know of a good way of doing that? I've tried a couple of different off-the-shelf "CD repair" kits, both the polish-out-the-scratches kind and the fill-the-scratches kind, and haven't had better than a 50% success rate with either one.

(Hmm. Maybe if I tried using the polisher and then the filler on the same disc...)

Re: maybe i'm paranoid, but...

[bratling.livejournal.com]

no, i'm too lazy to actually do those things. i just like knowing it's theoretically possible. :-)

[genuine-snark.livejournal.com]

Beware the price war.

The only worthy BR player out there is the PS3. The format's still in flux, with Profile 2.0 coming, and the PS3 is flash-upgradable all the way through. The rest of the players may or may not be upgradable.

If you or friends are in the market, you should be looking at the cheapest PS3, at least for the moment.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, so I've heard. But I don't think we're in the market yet. We have more pressing uses for our money right now.

(Like a new bench vise!¹ Ah, I slay myself. Thank you, I'll be here all week.)


[1] Just kidding² about the new bench vise.
[2] Well, sort of. I could do with a better one, but right now, I don't have a place to mount the one I have. And actually, a more pressing "pressing" use would be getting my reloading bench reassembled so I could mount my loading presses.