It's Official: Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD-DVD Businesses

[Sir Terrence the Terrible]

one still wonders though if blu-ray came out to early. with the kerfuddel of the bluray profile compatability on older players, will the early supporters be happy with the victory if they cant play future content correctly? although i have not invested one cent in hd-dvd, at least it was a developed format, i just dont think it was marketed as well. if microsoft built in the hd dvd player it would have been a completely different story, missed an oppurtunity there.

and i prefer boxers

cheers:dazza

I think both formats came out too early. Toshiba's A1 and XA-1 were as big a diaster as their latest offerings are. I do not think that HD DVD was all that developed of a format. Yes it had PIP, yes it had more interactivity, but with a smaller pipeline and less disc capacity, it could not take advantage of these pluses without the exclusion of Dolby TrueHD on the disc. No other codecs aside from VC-1 are primarily used on HD DVD, AVC has been used, but that use has been sponsered by Toshiba, and it was Toshiba's AVC encoder. DTHD was totally underutilized, and because of the constant use of VC-1, and average to poor transfers, HD DVD video scores compared to Blurays suffered. Quality control was all over the map, with some players doing just fine, and other unable to make it through a movie.

Microsoft did not build a HD DVD drive into the XBOX360 was very telling. They must have known that HD DVD had an uphill battle, and didn't want their franchise to suffer if it went belly up. I seriously doubt that microsoft really believed in HD DVD. I believe they supported it to get back at the BDA, and Sony for not adopting HDi or VC-1 as part of the manditory spec for Bluray. The fact they did not participate in negotiations with Warner was also very telling. I think Microsoft has pretty much torn their pants in Hollywood.

[Woochifer]

Microsoft did not build a HD DVD drive into the XBOX360 was very telling. They must have known that HD DVD had an uphill battle, and didn't want their franchise to suffer if it went belly up. I seriously doubt that microsoft really believed in HD DVD. I believe they supported it to get back at the BDA, and Sony for not adopting HDi or VC-1 as part of the manditory spec for Bluray. The fact they did not participate in negotiations with Warner was also very telling. I think Microsoft has pretty much torn their pants in Hollywood.

The other issue with the Xbox360 is that the console itself came out before HD-DVD was introduced, and there MS was deadset on getting the Xbox360 as big a head start as possible over the PS3. To them, waiting for the HD-DVD drives to arrive in mass quantities would have meant missing out on the holiday shopping season in 2005, and bumping up the console price by probably about $100. Even so, the Xbox360 still got rushed to market, and has been plagued by QC problems (a report that came out last week shows the Xbox 360 with a failure rate more than 5X greater than for the Wii and PS3). To MS, the gaming market share meant everything, so there was no way that they would let HD-DVD's timetable affect the Xbox360 introduction.

Lost amidst the shockwave created by the Warner announcement in January was the rumors regarding MS' HD-DVD plans for the Xbox360. Bill Hunt reported that Bill Gates' keynote speech at CES included numerous HD-DVD announcements, including a Xbox360 model with an integrated HD-DVD drive. But, once Warner's announcement hit, MS had to completely backtrack and jettison close to 40% of Gates' original presentation. I wonder how many of those HD-DVD Xbox360s are now sitting in limbo at some warehouse!

Sony on the other hand was perfectly willing to sacrifice market share on the gaming side to ensure that Blu-ray would become the next-gen optical format of choice. The PS3 had all sorts of technical issues crop up while the Cell processor was in development, yet in the end the bottleneck was the Blu-ray drive. On the gaming side, with these delays and the very high introductory price (largely driven by the Blu-ray drive's initially high cost), the PS3 not only lost market share, but it also lost most of its exclusive franchises. Only last month did PS3 console sales finally pass the Xbox360.

Sony paid a high price to get Blu-ray where it is now. We'll find out in the next few years if Blu-ray's victory was worth sacrificing the Playstation franchise's market lead.

I totally agree that MS' HD-DVD support was both half-a$$ed and two-faced. Their market push was VC-1 and downloading, and still is. HD-DVD was simply an opportunity for them to throw a monkey wrench into Blu-ray, which had already amassed the vast majority of the CE players and major studios.

[diggity]

im sorry iwasn't aware of the problems toshiba had with their early players, we only really got into hd-dvd here in australia with their latest batch. before that we didn't have many outlets selling them. what is interesting is that only 2 weeks ago toshiba sales repcame to me and asked if would consider stocking hd-dvd players, to which i politlely said no, two days later they approached company owner and told him of all the software "sales" hd-dvd has and he said yes. we now have 20 players!!

interesesting to see what deals they will do so i can get rid of them. i also 100% agree with both of you thats xbox360 came out too early with so many buge, overheating, unstavle disc tray, xboxlive crashing nearly once a month just to get a lead on sony. but now bluray has won ps3 sales should rise sharply as its a very good way to get hd playback at a good price.

cheers dazza