Resistance is Futile
Gartner: HD DVD price cuts only prolong agony
“Price cuts by Toshiba on its HD DVD players in the U.S. earlier this month may prove to be “useless resistance” in the battle against the rival Blu-ray Disc optical disc format, according to Gartner.
The market research company expects Blu-ray Disc to win the battle against HD DVD (high definition digital video disc) in the consumer market by the end of 2008, becoming the next generation replacement for DVDs.
Toshiba’s price cuts came after a major Hollywood studio, Warner Bros., announced it would shift from producing in both formats to just Blu-ray alone, expanding the disc format’s advantage in the number of movies and other content. Five of the seven major Hollywood studios now back Blu-ray Disc exclusively, while the HD DVD camp has just two, Paramount and Universal.
“Gartner believes that Toshiba’s price-cutting may prolong HD DVD’s life a little, but the limited line-up of film titles will inflict fatal damage on the format. Gartner expects that, by the end of 2008, Blu-ray will be the winning format in the consumer market, and the war will be over, wrote analyst Hiroyuki Shimizu in Gartner’s Semiconductor DQ Monday Report.”
Read the whole Computerworld Singapore article here…
It’s about frikkin’ time, I’d say.
But you know what I think the real reason is why Blu-ray won (jumping ever so slightly ahead here) over HD DVD ? It’s quite simple, actually. Blu-ray rolls easier over the tongue; age-dee-dee-vee-dee as a smooth and easy word-to-use-on-a-daily-base just doesn’t cut it.
All joking aside, the real fun part of this format war is that the industry is already hard at work at Blu-ray’s (and HD DVD) successor. So, by the time you and I (Jeff excluded 
) actually know what stuff to buy, the tech industry will slam us in the face with yet another format (or two, or three), surpassing the almost-current standards 100-fold over. “Fifty gigabytes on your old skool Blu-ray disc, you say ?!” “Oh men, you’re so behind, you know… I’ve got this new Rainbow-ray-futzpah thang here, and it’s got the frigging whole Warner Bros. catalog on one (1!) single disc. In 4K resolution. With director’s commentary in seventeen languages, including Latin. And extras for all films. In DTS 12.1. And the Deluxe Edition also holds a few games, like Quake XVII (Format Wars), Halo IX (Ring of Rings), WoW VIII (Extraterrestrial Edition) and Guitar Hero (Twelve-String, double-neck version). The Platinum Hollywood Collectors Edition (double layer Rainbow-ray-futzpah disc, so not released yet because of lack of compatible hardware) will also hold the whole Internet as cached by Googlapple since 2008.” “Take that, Blu-ray… you’re pwnd!”.
Damn bloody Mondays.
« My HyFy
Comment from Dan
Time: February 10, 2008, 1:28 pm
I was wondering about this recently, as I considered buying myself a 1080p TV - is the usefulness of having ever larger storage media starting to reach a plateau. Sure, HDTV looks much better than regular TV, and I imagine that HD could still be improved on - but I think that beyond this point there are diminishing returns for any better quality.
Of course, like you say the next format could come with even more content. But all that content takes some making: I guess that for repurposing old content it makes a nice alternative to boxed sets, but for new movies we’re not going to get a lot more for our money unless it’s very cheap or free to make.
I’ve noticed a similar thing with my use of disk drives: for most of my life, it feels like I’ve been struggling to find enough disk space to put all of my crap on, but all of a sudden I find myself with several 500Gb drives and, for the first time ever, enough space to properly back up all of my content to more than one location. In another 2-3 years’ time we may find 10Tb drives within our reach, but will we be able to find anything to put on them?