Fatality, Blu-Ray wins.
The dust has cleared and one winner was left standing as Toshiba announced earlier today that it would halt production on it’s line of HD-DVD players.
With Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, Pioneer and JVC backing the Blu-Ray, it was pretty much just matter of time before HD-DVD spun it’s last cycle and went the way of the Betamax.
The news follows the announcement last week that Netflix, Walmart and Best Buy were going to phase out the use of the HD DVD format. With fewer and fewer options when it comes to finding the format in stores or even studios who would release movies that way, Toshiba has made the right albeit hard decision.
Implications of the HD DVD demise reaches even further than just the movie sales market, the video game market will feel the shockwaves of this as well.
For the first time since its launch, the PS3 beat the Xbox 360 in sales last month. 269,000 PS3s were sold versus only 230,000 for the Xbox 360. Now the Wii outsold both of them with a staggering 375,000 units sold. The thing is, the Wii is not a factor or even interested in the next gen DVD player war. If it would have been, we might have gotten a different announcement today. This all seems trivial but becomes rather imprtant whe you consider the “built-in” factor. The PS3 comes equipped with a Blu-Ray player whereas the 360 needed an attachment to be able to play HD-DVDs.
Although the truth of the matter is that for most gamers, what matters the most is the games that the systems play, not the format of movies that you can watch on them. How the demise of the HD DVD format will actually affect the console war is yet to be seen. Microsoft has yet to issue a comment on what will happen with the HD-DVD accessory and whether it plans on creating a Blu-Ray accessory in it’s stead. If things would have ended differently, the PS3 would have suffered a disastrous set back because of it’s inability to back track.One thing for sure: Microsoft can if it wants to. If 360 sales drop further, market analysts speculate that a Blue-Ray 360 accessory could hit shelves as soon as Xmas 08.
-Originally published by the Shoreline Community College student paper, the Ebbtide-
I think what we’re most likely to see is a larger capacity hard drive for the 360 to store downloaded HD movies. I don’t think Microsoft has it in them to support a rivals technology, even if it would benefit them.
I doubt that Microsoft is going to give money to Sony for every machine that they could theoretically create a blu-ray sku for.
My theory is that Microsoft was using HD DVD as a stall tactic until Comcast could release it’s uber-high speed connection service, thus an HD movie could be downloaded in a few minutes. They just wanted to make sure Blu-Ray didn’t take dominance before they could.
I thought that Microsoft would have shown off a spiffy new huge hard drive at CES when Comcast did their connection speed, but there’s a slim chance that it could be unveiled before E3, if not then.
In any case, it seems like they may have missed the boat on this one by not getting it out fast enough.
Whoops, ok, this just came up. Microsoft has announced that they will no longer support the HD DVD add on for the 360. But “we do not believe this decision will have any material impact on the Xbox 360 platform or our position in the marketplace,” says the press release from the company.
R.I.P. HD DVD….we barely knew ye.