

Toshiba to give up on HD DVD, end format war - nickb
http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSL1637974620080216

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dcurtis
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>

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baddox
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!

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mynameishere
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.

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

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

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cstejerean
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.

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aston
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.

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cstejerean
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.

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boredguy8
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>?

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ivankirigin
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.

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gscott
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.

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tx
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.

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brlittle
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?

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tx
:-) 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?

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brlittle
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!

