Toshiba to give up on HD DVD, end format war | Hacker News Reader

Toshiba to give up on HD DVD, end format war

reuters.com

32 pointsnickb19 comments

I wonder, if you offset the losses of the Playstation 3 group at Sony with the gains of winning the format war, if Sony came out ahead after all.

And of course, for anyone who missed it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywWfmRdOmJ0

I assume Sony planned on eventually breaking even on the PS3 with game sales alone, since that's a typical strategy for console hardware. The real question is, how much money did they pay Netflix and other groups to ensure victory for Blu Ray, and will that be worth it to them? Honestly, at this point they'd probably be willing to bankrupt themselves to finally win a format war!

Disks are such a pain. What I want is an 500 gb flash card for $1.99. I suspect I'll get that soon enough.

And not a half decade too soon. Any longer and they would be competing with download formats.

Does anyone know what's going to happen to people who try to return their HD DVD players?

I don't think they're going to do a recall on the existing players. They're already loosing a ton of money without having to give back bash to the early adopters. It's part of the cost of being an early adopter though.

I wouldn't have bought either a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player until it was clear who the winner was. But I was wiling to buy a PS3 since even if Blu-ray ended up loosing I would at least have a game console. I think a lot of folks that would have not bought either early ended up getting Bluray as a side effect of buying the PS3 (and this inevitably tipped the scales since sales and rentals of Bluray content were outperforming HD-DVD).

I'm wondering why anyone decided to go against Sony on this when the PS2 was essentially responsible for the wide adoption of DVDs.

Well, PS3 was not responsible for the wide adoption of Blu-Ray. The studios were.

If the PS3 had been an all out slam dunk like the PS2, Toshiba wouldn't have given up, they would've lost. As it stands, the PS3 isn't really even outselling the PS2 by that much.

I'm not sure. There aren't that many Bluray drives out there. So of the few that exist I'm pretty sure a good percentage are PS3's. Even if Bluray had a slight edge of HD-DVD because of PS3's (it's obviously not a huge edge) this would lead to more rentals (and Blockbuster dropped support for HD-DVD from stores after running a pilot and finding out Bluray was renting 3 to 1).

Since Blockbuster isn't renting HD-DVD and Walmart stopped selling them, studios are being forced to release on Bluray which means people have access to more titles, which in turn makes Bluray players more valuable.

This snowball effect is slowly (for now) killing the HD-DVD industry.

I was thinking more along the lines of Sony giving a $50 discount to people who exchanged HD DVD players for Blu-ray players, just to solidify their victory.

Do you guys think Sony will even consider this route?

sorry, I accidentally downmoded you (why do those arrows have to be so small and so close together?).

Upmodded in compensation.

There's going to be a class-action lawsuit and after many years of litigation, owners of HD DVD players will get $50 coupon for something (but only if you submit a lengthy claim form and attach original receipt). And lawyers will pocket tens of millions of dollars in fees. Welcome to "capitalism."

I hope this is wrong. It would break a fundamental law of the universe: Sony Never Wins Format Wars. What next, <insert random irony here>?

80% of the commentary on HD just dried up. Thank god. Maybe people will finally figure out how to cable their systems to actually get HD.

Microsoft is big on HD DVD and hates Blu-Ray... so I wonder what they are going to do now if they can't have it there way. I could see MS stepping in and getting HD-DVD players produced for computers only. The music industry does not want the storage capacity of Blue-Ray on computers and Microsoft is in bed with Riaa so they will probably team up on this.

Who cares? Why so much fuss over this "format war"? Format of what? An ancient concept of storing read-only bits glued over a piece of plastic? I don't plan on using CDs or DVDs or any kind of big physical objects to store anything on in the future.

Is it snarky to ask what you mean by "big physical object?" Most things are big on a relative scale. Besides, what do you plan to do in the interim between now and whenever the proposed future arrives?

:-) In my case future has arrived already. I don't use CDs or DVDs for anything, except rare OS installations and Mac Air already shows how that can be done without a CD.

I am on the network, nearly all the time. Plus I have a 4GB flash drive and soon I'll get 32GB one of the same price.

Why would I want a read-only plastic disk for?

Not a question I can answer. ;)

But I want one because the quality of Blu-ray (or whatever hi-def format) simply beats the snot out of anything I can get via download. So perhaps that's a subjective thing. I'm not ready to kick my physical media to the curb at this time, though I do wish I could rip the hi-def formats.

Let me know when you find that deal on 32GB flash drives...I'll be right in line behind you for 2 or 3!

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