Oleg

I think the key phrase here is "larger amount of users". The studios and equipment manufacturers have to walk a very tight line here. With a $30+ billion dollar market that is DVDs, 5 million or so discs, with a minor to the average customer glitch is doable. With a market for HD media a tiny tiny fraction of that, burning early adopters has got to be questionable. Sure, a good percentage of that number are film buffs who will own the latest and greatest they can afford. But I bet that with $99 Wal-Mart and similar amazon discounts a decent number of HD players have been purchased by people who do not own both platforms, who are price-conscious, and who will be content to watch HD cable/sat/OTA and forget the fickle and annoying HD media market if they get burned on their purchase.

ScissorPuppy

Plus, the last i checked, to this day players are still playing VCDs as an added feature.

Hmmmm, Atleast HD DVD had a short life. VCD was dead before it got here. To america that is.

Jon2

It may be even easier than that. Maybe.

My family and I were away from home for four months last summer. When we left, all electronics were turned off/unplugged. HDTV, DirecTV, sound system, etc.

For several reasons our son's PS3 is hooked up to our HDTV. A few days before we left I had tried several ways (burned the file to a disc, USB drive, etc.) to update the PS3, but everything failed.

In hindsight, my problems with updating the PS3 are probably due to issues with the computer I was using at the time.

At any rate, the network option wouldn't work as the PS3 had lost its connection to our home wireless network when the network was down for several days a couple of weeks earlier. The network problem wasn't discovered until I tried to update the system. Every time I tried to reestablish a network connection it failed and gave me a message stating the system had to be updated... and I couldn't update the system until I could reestablish a network connection.

At the time I didn't have the time oo inclination to deal with it, so I figured it could wait until we got back.

Well... when we got back, imagine my surprise when I turned on the PS3 and discovered that it had reestablished its connection to our wireless network and was running the updated system.

Go figure.

Lord Rick

I have no doubt you are wrong. 5 million is a drop in the bucket, as mentioned.

The two technologies are different. I read somewhere that they use a different aperture size, and the discs have different track sizes.

This isn't going to happen folks. It won't be cost-effective to keep the factories running that produce HD-DVD discs. WB already said no more after May. The rest will follow.

No more discs = tiny market for HD-DVD players.

CE manufacturers will invest time and money into players that will have hundreds of millions, even billions of discs coming out for their players.

Gizmo

You do know its very easy to make HD DVDs and the cost is not much more then DVD, right?

Blu-ray requires a brand new 1 Million dollar line, HD DVD can be added on and removed from an existing DVD line.

Lord Rick

Sigh. I give up after this.

There is a LOT more to the cost of producing a title than disc replication. Shipping, marketing, AUTHORING (!!!), and on and on.

Not to mention that Best Buy, Walmart etc aren't going to waste shelf space on a product that has very few buyers in each town relative to the Blu-ray or dare I say it DVD owners.

ILikeDVD

"C'est la vie"

wewantflair

Just watch and see. LG has a dual drive that retails for 249. You can currently CTO one in any HP PC, since HP has apparently bought a boatload of them.

Look at it this way. There are far, far fewer SACD/DVDA discs in the wild than there are HD DVD's, yet those formats are supported by many players on the market. Why do you think that is?

darkside

I think this is one of the bigger issues. Stores like Best Buy are giving up a lot of shelf space for both HD DVD and Blu-ray considering how low the sales are for the HD formats. I expect to see those HD DVD sections cleared out pretty quickly at most B&M stores. I wouldn't be surprised if HD DVD was gone by the summer.

RayChuang

This is why I think we may see Toshiba offer a lower-cost combo HD-DVD/Blu-ray player later this year, not only to play the dominant-format Blu-ray discs, but also to play legacy HD-DVD discs. But it will only be sold in one generation before Toshiba switches completely to all-Blu-ray production, probably by spring 2009 at latest.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

I guess in one way the war may be over but BR still hasn't come close to a market share compared to SD.

I will add that I don't own a HD-DVD player but I do own a PS3. I only have 5 BR movies but haven't bought any since last summer since if I go with the SD version I can cheaply get a player for any room to watch it on and I get more bonus/exclusive stuff than paying more for the BR version.

Something comparable between BR and SD that I would buy the BR version of is the Blade Runner suitcase because everything is the same between the two(yeah, yeah, other than picture and sound).

darkside

I don't think it has even come to 1% of that market share. Blu-ray has a tough hill to climb so the HD war ending probably is the best thing for the future of HD discs.

darkside

I think they may even support HD DVD longer. Sony was still putting SACD support in the PS3 up to the 40GB version. I don't think Toshiba will be quick to completely let go of that format. They may give in and make dual format players, but they will try to keep their format alive in some way for as long as possible. If anything maybe a large portion of HD DVD supporters will stay loyal to Toshiba when they buy a BD player. I know I would prefer to buy a BD/HD combo player from them.

Parasol Stars

I totally agree with your statement. What has happened in the last few months with HD DVD is not uncommon to what happened when Dreamcast died back in 2001. Sega cut the price of hardware many times and had promotions to try to install enough users to make the system viable. But it just wasnt enough. The looming shadow of the PS2 was too great a competitor. Maybe getting a 100 dollar player and a bunch of movies wasnt really as great an idea as it sounded, when you wind up being stuck with a format and media that is singing its swan song.

GMan2819

If HD DVD is to have any chance for a future, they have to stop new releases on SD DVD and only release on Twin Disc or Combos and drop the MSRP to $29.99 so that they can street at ~ $22.

Pizza

That would certainly go over well.

bunkaroo

I think there are enough differences in the way Blu-Ray and HD DVD have to be read that any Blu-Ray machine wanting to play back HD DVD essentially has to be a combo player, which would mean hardware that is there for no other reason than to read HD DVD's.

I don't see Blu-Ray CE's spending any more money on parts and extra design time than they have to, even if they don't pass along that savings.

Also, I would think all the HDi stuff would be non-functional as well unless the machine was a true combo player.

darkside

They will not kill their standard DVD sales to help HD DVD.

The Bus

darkside: Agreed.

I thought I read that Toshiba sold 1MM HD DVD drives in Q4 of 2006 alone. A friend mentioned this, I don't have a link.

Just as Sony's PS3 still plays ATRAC (what? really?), I hope that for the next year or two, Toshiba's players play HD DVD and BD.

Certainly, my next set-top is most likely to be a combo, then HD DVD only, then BD.

GMan2819

If it streets at ~$22, that's about what new 2 disc releases go for and ~$5 more than a single disc. People who aren't willing to pay that small premium are probably renters anyway. To make up for any lost sales revenue, they could work out a new arrangement with the rental chains.

DirkBelig

I am so sick and tired of the blather about how "the consumers chose Blu-ray" when most of the choices were made for them.

* Blockbuster only stocks Blu-ray (except for a relative handful of stores.)

* Many studios fell for Sony's lies that the PS2 made DVD successful and that with 100+ million PS2s sold, the PS3 was a slam dunk for the same amount of business. Studios swore fealty to Sony and then had to hang on while Sony burned their gamer base with a $600 price tag and hardly any compelling game titles.

The thing is, by sacrificing their gaming dominance -now in a distant third-place showing - in exchange for a format win and all the royalty $$$ that would bring, this time they can honestly say that a Playstation broke a video format.

But where were the consumers in all this gameplaying? Screwed! They didn't get to pick which format they preferred based on what suited them; they had their choices dictated to them. Want Spidey, John McClain, X-Men or Pixar, you had to go one color; Bourne, Matrix, Batman or Star Trek, you had to go the other way.

Someone pointed out somewhere just how badly Warner Brothers screwed over their customers. I would think that anyone who picked up a discounted Toshiba or a 360 attachment prior to Christmas and then bought five Harry Potter HDs would be mighty PO'ed that they now had to buy another player to get the final two chapters, but here's what one person pointed out:

Warner has actively encouraged people to buy HD DVD over BD in the past. If people wanted The Matrix, Batman Begins, V for Vendetta, Casablanca, Forbidden Planet, etc. they had to buy the HD DVD because it was unavailable on BD.

Very often if people wanted the superior version of a cross-platform title (True HD audio, PiP, extra features like the "300" blue screen) they had to buy the HD DVD because the BD did not offer the advanced audio or extra features.

Warner also packed-in their movies with Toshiba HD-DVD players. Every indication was that Warner preferred the business model of HD DVD.

WB says that the sales edge for BD was a good enough reason to throw their HD buyers overboard, but do you see EA or Activision announcing they'll only sell to Xbox 360 because PS3 has about a quarter of the market?

Toshiba's greatest strategic blunder was to try and match Sony's dirty tactics by dragging Paramount/Dreamworks into the red corner when they should've worked to get Fox/Disney et al to go neutral. Then player costs and customer desires could've been considered, but that's precisely why Sony couldn't allow this to happen.

The final piece of the puzzle is that Blu-ray is the most consumer-unfriendly format, thus making it the most studio-desired. Region coding and extra DRM can't be discounted as powerful factors in their decisions.

Ocelot

i don't get it... if BD is the most consumer-unfriendly format and it's the most desired by the studios? So, basically, the studios want a consumer-unfriendly format? HUH?

bookcase3

I don't think studios care one way or another how their decisions will affect consumers -- they care about money, and would just as soon trample over consumers to get to where the money is. I mean this on both ends of the spectrum: Bluray and HD DVD alike.

TheMovieman

I guess so...

I chose HD-DVD because of price and the fact that the BR player specs weren't final (and the titles available also played a part). Someone who owns an A1 (or A2, A3, etc) doesn't have to worry about a new disc not playing while someone using 1.0 profile might not be able to view certain features on a disc made for 1.1 profiles. Not to mention, outside of the PS3, there isn't a BR player with internet capabilities, right? I believe that is this whole profile 2.0 thing.

I'd love to get into BR but not for $400+. $250 and under is my price point, but even then it'll have to be a 1.1 player.

GogoTheMimic

It has more copy protection so ideally it means less pirating, which we know isn't the case since the "best" protection Blu-Ray offers was cracked days after it's release.

It also can lead to frustrating problems for consumers if the player won't read through the copy protection, I've even had this happen with game discs for my XBox and PS2 on occasion.