RIP HD DVD
Although the writing has been on the wall for a number of weeks now, the demise of the HD DVD format is coming much faster than anyone expected.Last week, major retailers such as Netflix, Best Buy and Wal-Mart announced their plans to no longer carry (or at the very least, no longer promote) the HD DVD format. Now comes word from Japan that Toshiba is totally abandoning HD DVD, with an official announcement expected possibly as early as this week.
We suspect that the official announcement from Toshiba will be followed shortly by announcements from studios Paramount and Universal that they will no longer be releasing movies on HD DVD. While the major studios have future HD DVD releases scheduled until at least the end of May, we suspect that some of them might be cancelled, although some of the bigger titles may be honored. We’re also guessing that no future HD DVD release announcements will be made. In short, expect all the major studios to be Blu-ray committed (yes, even the reluctant Universal) by the beginning of summer.
Fortunately, those who invested in HD DVD still have 100s of movies available to watch in HD (although if you don’t have a certain title, you may want to pick it up now while stock can still be found) and the majority of players are excellent upconverters for standard DVD releases.
Hey, at the very least, you may be able to sell yours for a downpayment on a shiny new Blu-ray player.
UPDATE: Tuesday morning, Toshiba officially announced it was getting out of the HD DVD business. Their press release can be read HERE.
posted by Shannon T. Nutt at 4:36 AM
9 Comments:
I just heard today that Bestbuy &Wal mart are now ditching HD DVD for total support for Blu Ray. This is great news for Sony but as an employee of Bestbuy (here in WA state) that works in their Home Theater dept this has already brought in some negative feedback and comments from previous customers. Even though I personally advised my customers that I would hold out from buying one of the two rival formats it still didn't stop a few of them. Both formats have there pros and cons but I'm glad it looks like the war is finally over. The best is yet to come.
And not a moment to soon. I really hope that these studios (WB, Paramount/DreamWorks, Universal) offer some sort of trade in program if they end up supporting Blu-Ray. The HD DVD players do make nice upconverting players though, aside from some of them not displaying all shades of black of HDMI. But maybe now we can all just get back to enjoying movies!
This is THE news that will end this war officially. Finally, the war will be over in a few hours. I'm glad that I chose the BD side as I knew all along that BD IS the successor to DVD. I don't want to hear HD VOD or Apple TV, they are NOT as close to the actual video and audio quality of hidef media. Not to mention the special features, etc. that you can have.
Great work BLU! Well deserved.
Glad to see it is all over and that the format with the higher bit-rate came out ahead.
Hopefully prices will come down on media so that the real war can begin - the war against regular DVD : )
Looks like Universal has officially joined into the Blu camp. I would imagine a Paramount announcement for Blu should be forthcoming as well, so we can finally move forward with unified support.
Thank God this happened early. I supported both formats and I only Had about 15 HD DVDs, and the A2 does in fact make a nice upconverting DVD player that just so happens to play HD DVDs as well, Surprisingly enough I want more HD DVDs though! There should be a firesale on HD DVD moies at this point. When are the movie prices dropping?
Blu-Ray, the better format, gets the green light. YEA! If you're thinking something is going to come along and knock Blu-Ray out of the Hi-Def video areana soon, don't be fooled. The bit rate for a Blu-Ray movie varies between 30 and 40 Mega bits per second with some video content requiring a bandwidth as high as 50 Mbps. This makes downloading (streaming) a movie impossible for anyone with less than a fiber optic high speed internet connection (100 Mbps). Most cable modems (pretty much the fastest available) are around 8 Mbps. This means a movie would take around 10 hours to download. NOT very convenient. Sure, they could compress it more - but that would defeat the whole purpose of Hi-Def movie watching. Long live Blu-Ray.
What leaves a bad taste about this debacle is that Blu Ray won because Sony bribed the studios to limit releases to its format. HD DVD players were cheaper, as were disks, and they were not region limited but with most content limited to Blu Ray the writing was on the wall. Don't expect Blu Ray disks to drop in price either. Now they have a monopoly there will be no pressure to drop prices. At close to $40 per disk I shall stick to upconverted standard DVDs for the present.
$40 per disc? Have you looked at this site for Blu-Rays? If you look at the suggested retail price of each disc, they're generally the same for titles released on both formats except for the combo titles which have a suggested price of $5-$10 more for the HD DVD, not the Blu-Ray. And the exclusive titles follow the same pricing as non exclusive ones with the exception of Fox titles. Though now they're even dropping their catalog title prices. Which is odd considering you're saying the prices wont be coming down now that the war is over.
What studios did Sony bribe? WB has denied it repeatedly and there's absolutely no evidence that they took a bribe. They even called Paramount out on how Toshiba paid them $150 mil for their support along with DreamWorks.
So Fox? The reason they're with Blu-Ray is due to copy protection. HD DVD's is cracked and there's not a thing they can do about it where as Blu-Ray has BD+ which still hasn't been cracked. And Blu-Ray also has regional encoding which Fox chooses to use.
New Line also uses the regional encoding due to the fact that when they release a Blu-Ray here in the states, a movie may not have even opened up in another country yet and they don't want to hurt the box office. That's why titles like Shoot 'Em Up, Hairspray and Rush Hour 3 ended up never seeing their HD DVD releases.
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