Gizmodo
We have been saying it for ages, but now it's official. HD DVD has been pronounced dead on Tuesday, February 19, 2008, even before the press conference has started, according to our Ichiroo, from Gizmodo Japan. Toshiba's press release is out in the wild. The Format War is over. Full release after the jump.
Toshiba even published this in their servers before the press release hit the official wires. And of course, they are not supporting Blu-ray, just standard DVD for now.
Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD DVD Businesses19 February, 2008
Company Remains Focused on Championing Consumer Access to High Definition Content
TOKYO—Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.
HD DVD was developed to offer consumers access at an affordable price to high-quality, high definition content and prepare them for the digital convergence of tomorrow where the fusion of consumer electronics and IT will continue to progress.
"We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop," said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. "While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality."
Toshiba will continue to lead innovation, in a wide range of technologies that will drive mass market access to high definition content. These include high capacity NAND flash memory, small form factor hard disk drives, next generation CPUs, visual processing, and wireless and encryption technologies. The company expects to make forthcoming announcements around strategic progress in these convergence technologies.
Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe, yet will continue to make efforts to meet customer requirements. The company will continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives within the overall PC business relative to future market demand.
This decision will not impact on Toshiba's commitment to standard DVD, and the company will continue to market conventional DVD players and recorders. Toshiba intends to continue to contribute to the development of the DVD industry, as a member of the DVD Forum, an international organization with some 200 member companies, committed to the discussion and defining of optimum optical disc formats for the consumer and the related industries.
Toshiba also intends to maintain collaborative relations with the companies who joined with Toshiba in working to build up the HD DVD market, including Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and DreamWorks Animation and major Japanese and European content providers on the entertainment side, as well as leaders in the IT industry, including Microsoft, Intel, and HP. Toshiba will study possible collaboration with these companies for future business opportunities, utilizing the many assets generated through the development of HD DVD.
[Toshiba]
Comments
Rest in peace HD DVD :(
We hardly knew you...
In the beginning I had my bets resting on HD DVD.
I was sadly mistaken :'(
R.I.P
Michael Bay just exploded in his pants!
RIP HD-DVD
i feel sorry for all the people who bought HD-DVD players thinking that it was the next gen in video formats but they were wrong
Long Live Blu-Ray
Cheers!
*Dramatic woman at end of movie*
It's finally over...
Man, i'm happy i've waited, i almost bought the HD DVD addon for my 360....if they start dumping them for very low prices i might pick one up just to add it to the game collection :)
It's concerning that several retail chains are still selling what is now officially a dead format. In reality they are now preying on unwitting customers to offset some of their poor investments. I can already see the Thursday flyers for BestBuy and FutureShop here in Canada: "HD-DVD players 50% off! Comes with 10 HD-DVD movies" etc etc. I hope those who still can are returning their recently purchased players so they don't get stuck with them.
Wow and it all started with WB backing Blu-Ray after that announcement it was nothing but fatal deathblows to HD-DVD one after another. What a quick death!
@mor10: I was wondering that as well, will Toshiba reimburse retailers or issue a recall, or will chains like Best Buy and others who still have quite a stock of HD DVD product be stuck with it and have to figure out how to get rid of it?
Now that this format war is over, it's time people start adopting download technologies such as Tivo and AppleTV or streaming tech (Netflix and TV Networks) for their content needs so we can beat that format owning grin off of Sony's corporate face.
@Vagabum:
Blu-ray has a bigger hill to climb than HD-DVD. They have the bloody mountain that is standard DVD's. You think they just want to be the HD alternative to DVD's? Hell no, they want to replace DVD's in the future.
It's going to be a million times harder than killing HD-DVD and it means we'll still see competitive pricing on hardware and software for some time to come
@Vagabum: Frankly my friend, a good portion of the market are not ready (and for good reason) to go for a download only industry. So you can go ahead and say this, but it'll be years before anything like that even gains a threat against Sony's victory here.
I for one prefer to own physical media, movies, games, and CD's.
Yes, I still buy CD's.
so when will toshiba begin producing blu-ray players?
@Part-Time-Viking: Yea, because virtual things can be delteed easily and hard to get back.
@HoseHead: Probably next year when DVD's are crying in a corner saying "please stop you've gone far enough!".
Goddammit, you bitch! You never backed away from anything in your life! Now fight!
[slaps Toshiba]
Fight!
[slaps Toshiba again]
Fight! Right now! Do it! Fight goddammit! Fight! Fight! Fiiiiight!
@--Tito--: Not necessarily that, because if the work goes into setting up individual accounts for it, you could keep purchase records backed up so in the event of corrupt, deleted, or lost downloads that the distributer could keep a mark on the individuals account showing that the person on the other end has indeed payed for the movie.
But that doesn't change the fact that I'd still rather have a physical copy of any kind of media.
No news from Universal or Paramount.
@Tristan_The_Giant:
Bravo. Bravo. Bravo!
@--Tito--: That was a non story, as far as we were concerned. I'm going to delete that comment, but for the record, Tito just dropped ina link about Toshiba saying no to Blu ray. Duh.
@Vagabum: In your dream. Most of us don't have the bandwidth nor the patience to download 50GB films.
@Vagabum: When will people stop throwing out the same old argument against physical media? You download something, you're going to lose it. But, then again, you can only lose it if you have the thousands of hours, unlimited resources to pay that power bill, and a non-intrusive ISP (I'm looking at you, Comcast) that will actually allow you to theoretically have the capability of downloading video in 1080p/i.
So until that day, kindly shut up and go away.
If you bought or buy an HD DVD player for cheap u can still play DVD's on it and prob will have some really low priced movies to buy for it so its not a total loss. I mean honestly are DVD's so bad?
I like discs, frankly. I dont' want to use HDD space for that stuff, and then have it all die or require a big HDD to HDD transfer later. Discs are nice.
Retailers should market their remaining HD DVD players as high end DVD upscalers and sell them on the cheap...sure, they'll incur losses, but it's better to sell the stock that way than try to convince some schmuck to buy the HD DVD player as a true high-def format when there will only be maybe 500 movies ever available in that format.
I can, at best, only tolerate movies in standard def DVD now that I've been playing Blu-ray discs for the past month. It's hard going back to SD once you're HD-spoiled.
HD DVD is now chilling with BetaMax in format war heaven. I still believe the best format lost each war :(
@Vagabum:
Yeah once you finish re-wiring half the planet for true broadband and can find a decent sized SSD for less than a Kia we'll talk about me giving up ownership rights...
It will be interesting to see the effect of the demise of HD DVD on the sales of the PS3. What was the trojan horse of the HD format war could be the trojan horse of the next generation console war.
@Tristan_The_Giant: Abyss FTW!
I guess my HD-DVD spending spree wasn't enough to turn the tide. Ah, well, my votes never matter either.
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Well they are actually in the blu-ray market even though they lost they still won cause they make the cell processor which makes me think that they were the engineers of their own defeat
Well, I hope that we could at least put the outdated HD-DVD player in an archive so we don't lose it forever. In the beginning I thought it was gonna win because it was an upgrade to a DVD, but they didn't market it the way they did with the DVD and in the end they lost because of it. I didn't like the idea of blue ray because I thought it would fail like its "all power full and really successful" UMD. Well, I have a feeling there will be a second coming like Jesus soon, not 3 days but soon after the initial shut down.
HD-DVD was never offered here in Eastern Europe. We haven't had the opportunity to choose the wrong format. Any ideas why it was never introduced here?
It died to fast. . . how long did it take for the DVD to come out over there?
The HD DVD 360 add on, as well as the other HD DVD players, make for really excellent upconverting. I'll be fine with netflix and any movies I really want to keep I will buy the dvd, loaded with all the extras. I'm not purchasing any blu ray players or br movies, they are too expensive and there so set standard profile yet. Region encoding really sucks too.
It's still hard to believe the war ended so quickly. On Jan. 1, (just seven seeks ago), it appeared that the war might drag on for another year or more.
I'm glad the format war is over, but I'm not crazy about Sony winning. Yeah, they make some good stuff, but they try to shove proprietary stuff (like memory sticks, etc.) down your throat, and their customer service sucks.
Where are the analysts now? "Format war will continue for years!"
Ha!
Not even March of '08 and tis over! I'm glad my PS3 purchase was for not.
Cheers BD
great pic! but yeah, thank god its ova!!! gimme transformers already!!!!!
@taoprophet420:
I have always thought the better system/format loses too. Since Beta lost to VHS and then Atari 5200 lost to Colecovision and so on I thought this. GameCube was my favorite system last gen etc.
This is why I thought blu-ray would lose for sure. I actually really like my bluray player(PS3) better than my HDDVD machine(HD-A20).
But, I totally feel your pain!
just don't get too cocky again Sony!
By the way, to all those people yelling "BR is not owned by Sony!", reality check, Sony has a HUGE investment and are the MAIN backers to it. The majority of the licensing $ will go to Sony. There may be a consortium of 9 companies but Sony is #1 in that 9.
@TT: How can you compare the PS3 to a HD-A20? One is a gaming console with capability to play optical movies, while the other only plays movies. Obviously the PS3 is the better choice. But which plays movies better? How does the PS3 upconvert DVDs? The HD-A20 upconverts nicely.
SON OF A BITCH, damn it! I feel as foolish as those poor Betamaxees. Ugh.
Sony probably 'thinks' they are going to get a surge of blue ray purchasers. I'm sure not going to rush out and buy one until they fix their problems and drastically drop the price to the range the HD-DVDs were. Sony = Bastards!
@BostonPimpDaddy:
so, actually, it may be a small deal to most people but I liked the navigation on bluray a lot better than HDDVD. I am not sure if navigation is just not as good on all HDDVDs or it is my players model. Thats why I mentioned what I am using in case someone replied to me saying "well which player do you have" haha.
but the navigation menus are much sharper and responsive (quick) on my setup.
another annoying thing about the HD-A20 is setting the player on letterbox and when I watched the special features on say DUNE or V for Vendetta, it is pillar boxed INSIDE the letter box so I end up with pillar letter box. sorry, hope I am explaining well.
yes, I would say DVDs probably look better on my HD-A20. also, I think the surround sound is a bit superior. but this has to do with the player, not the format.
so back to your original question, I wasnt meaning to compare the players but simply explain I may have a bias toward BR due to my player or setup.
The way I look at it, I'm going to be able to buy 100's of HD-DVD's for very cheap while you blu-ray junkies will be paying triple the price. Sure I'll eventually have ALL of the HD-DVD's available but I will have saved 1000's of dollars vs buying a $1000 blu-ray player and paying $30-$100 for blu-ray disks. Bash HD-DVD all you want I saved money and you didn't.
If you bought a HD DVD player, HAHA! It will look nice on the shelf by your Betamax player.
"We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,"
Aww, how thoughtful of them. Here I was, thinking they just figured they'd loose.
@TT: the letterbox/pillarbox is my mistake. I take it back. just realized what stupid thing I was doing sorry.
Just my $.02 real quick: for those who don't think Sony will make a quick buck....after the HD stuff is cleaned out of Best Buy, we all know the boys in blue will be touting the PS3 as "Games + Hi Def Movies"...and there will NOT be an alternative (unless the fabled X360 + BD comes out).
As for "upscaling DVDs" on a PS3 as opposed to an HD-A20: in all honesty, you, me, and the rest of the guys and gals on Gizmodo care. Johnny on the street doesn't know the difference, and probably doesn't care.
I'm just sayin'...
PS3 has a better scaler than HD-A20... HD-XA2 is the only player that can come close.(Yes I have tested this)
But as for the reimbursement of HD-DVD players purchased Toshiba has no plans to do so.
As for the purchase of an HD-DVD player, not a bad idea at 50% off, you can purchase the movies for around $12 online right now. So you can build up a decent library of movies not currently available on Blu-Ray.
Last but definitely not least, are you really surprised that a technology Toshiba backed lost? Toshiba does not mean quality in the minds of the average consumer... They mean cheap, and disposable. I work retail, and that is the perception of the customer. Rarely does someone come in saying, "Hey, I heard that Toshiba looks great." Because they have read reviews that speak to the contrary. Nothing against Toshiba, but their niche in the market is the low end... Not the high....
{sigh}.
@ChiboFR:
@Hosalabad:
It's comments like these that really confirm my belief that humanity is screwed.
I think this internet thing might be over your heads guys. Just turn off the computer and go back to your coloring books. I think that's more your speed.
I guess all of you PS3 owners must be letting out a huge collective sigh of relief right about now. Had HD-DVD won out, your PS3 wouldn't be of much use at all. It certainly isn't that useful for games.
Oops... A little bit of commentard rubbed off on me from reading those earlier comments. My sincerest apologies.
FINALLY it's over.
Now for the prices of Blu-ray to go down. I'm not touching it when it's still so costly
someday I'll tell my grandchildren about how I fought in the format wars.
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The new format war may be over, but this does not mean that the new format will be successful. Blu-ray still may fail. Sure, it's on every PS3 and maybe one day xbox 360, but that doesn't mean that this will be the new format.