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Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD DVD Businesses

Company Remains Focused on Championing Consumer Access to High Definition Content

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--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.

Source

Whew! Only ten years before we have to go through this again.

Memory chip storage FTW in my book... Thumb drives are already surpassing the capacity of DVD's and will soon surpass blu-rays, and although they're nowhere near as cheap as DVD+R media, they eventually will be. The computer industry seems to be moving faster than the entertainment media industry.

I highly doubt that. Optical media costs cents to make.

Heh, covered that in the other thread a few days ago. This announcement, too... and the question still remains, "Why do we need a DVD replacement again?*"

*Other than making obsessive-compulsives and Star Wars fans buy the same movies for the 4th time.

Yeah... a 50GB thumb drive at the cost of something that'll soon drop to the prices of even dvd's. Quite a ways off.

Not too far off. Shit, look at the kind of memory the original PS1 had (like 256 KILObytes (Thanks for the catch. Yall know what I meant though! ) or something) for its memory cards. 4-5 years later it was 8 megs on the PS2.
2 gig flash drives are like 20 bucks now.

Its not far off. Less than 7 years easy!

I think you mean kilobytes on the PS1.

The HD-DVD thing was a joke. It was another Microsoft funded ramming-down-the-consumers-throat of a technology that had already been pioneered and perfected by another more competent company. If you need convincing, ask yourself why blu-ray was an integral part of the PS3 while the HD-DVD was only a peripheral to the Xbox - a completely unnecessary and now obsolete accessory that MS knew would eventually have to go away and thus could not be integral to the Xbox. It was always a ploy to make Sony and the PS3 suffer and it worked. Jesus, I'm sick of Microsoft fucking with the industry.

I'm going to guess the thing with HD-DVD was that it simply wasn't that expensive. Technical wise HD-DVD is a lot more similar to DVD than Blu-Ray is, as a result (I'm guessing) it is probably is easier to make HD-DVD stuff than Blu-Ray stuff. It would've been stupid imho for Msoft to not try and push the cheaper (I *think*) alternative especially if it ballooned the price of the PS3.

Quote from: Mosesandstick on February 20, 2008, 01:07:44 PM

There weren't many differences in cost. Here's one article that broke it down (a year old though). In some ways, Blu-Ray was actually cheaper. Link, and a follow up.

Thanks for the info. I wasn't just thinking of replication though. Everything I say is absolute theory but the main difference between HD-DVD and Blu Ray is that HD has a better lens and blu ray has a better laser. As far as I remember the lasers are not easy to produce which is why actually making blu-ray players could be more expensive than HD-DVD players. I could be completely wrong though Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

Quote from: Grand Design on February 20, 2008, 12:32:47 PM

If you need convincing, ask yourself why blu-ray was an integral part of the PS3 while the HD-DVD was only a peripheral to the Xbox - a completely unnecessary and now obsolete accessory that MS knew would eventually have to go away and thus could not be integral to the Xbox. It was always a ploy to make Sony and the PS3 suffer and it worked. Jesus, I'm sick of Microsoft fucking with the industry.

The XBox came out earlier than the PS3. Costs were higher, and MS wanted a budget line. Yes they wanted to fuck with Sony, just like Sony wanted to fuck with MS. More than that, MS didn't want to have a big missing feature on their media box that Sony had (HD), and they didn't want to support Sony while doing it. As for "knowing" HD-DVD was dead, it was backroom deals, not market, killed the HD-DVD. Sony coughed up piles of cash to buy the studios.

Microsoft kind of gave up early on it too... They jumped on the iptv thing... Didn't make much of an effort to support or market hd-dvd afterwards.

Microsoft never had long term plans for HD-DVD. You're kidding yourself if you think they don't eat losses daily in order to get a little more holding in a market where they ought not be. That's their bread and butter.

Its really not a matter of what is cheaper and what is better. These questions are secondary to motive. Microsoft has an insatiable urge to stick its fingers into everyone's pie. They invariably spend a ton of money and effort to produce an inferior product and then use their marketing dominance to push it - there are scores of examples of this practice. HD-DVD was never a serious contender, and yet, based on what has come out of the media in the past year, one could have sworn that blu-ray was DOA. Blu-ray has always been superior and was always seen as the preferable choice - but as long as Microsoft could keep up the illusion that you shouldn't invest in blu-ray becuase its dominance was dubious, the longer Sony and the PS3 by proxy would suffer - and MS would benefit.

Great, now I smell like a Linux user.

I'm not a Blu-Ray hater but a lot of this stuff is entirely speculative. None of us have any idea of the losses Msoft and Sony have incurred.

And I'm not a technophile but I don't think Blu-Ray is that superior to HD-DVD. You have to know about how easy it is to manufacture blu ray players, how cost-effective it is, etc. You also can't really criticise MSoft for wanting a piece of someone else's pie when that is the sole reason we are talking about the PS3...

Off the top of my head, it's superior in two significant ways:

A duel layer hd-dvd is 30gb, a duel layer blu-ray is 50.

For interactive content and menu authoring, hd-dvd is markup, xml based. Blu-Ray is java based.

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Non technical issues : wink

Blue cases are prettier than brown.

Studios chose it.

For whatever strange reason, dts-hd or dolby hd were unavailable on many hd-dvd movies.

[EDIT] Lol, "duel". My bad.

Good thing I didn't spend that much money on my HD DVD player - but now I have to go out and find a dual-format player. Sigh.

Not to be all blue or anything, but why do we need a second thread that is going to inevitably bring up the same crap from the existing one?

To make it more confusing. Duh.

I bet Yahtzee is behind this.

Quote from: Darniaq on February 21, 2008, 06:33:40 PM

Not to be all blue or anything, but why do we need a second thread that is going to inevitably bring up the same crap from the existing one?

That was my bad, i didn't check the other forum... I also didn't know it was posted in that thread already (At least the rumor was posted there, this was the official).