...send not to know for whom the bell tolls...
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
...it tolls for thee, HD DVD. Toshiba, the "captain" of the HD DVD ship, just announced that they are throwing in the towel. Thats right, the format war is officially over. All hail our new Blu-Ray powered overlords! Everything won't get cleaned up until the end of March at the earliest, but Toshiba is stopping production across the board. They have mentioned buying up recordable media and selling it online to HD DVD users, which I think is a very nice gesture (sadly, its also shocking in today's economic world).
According to Toshiba suits, there are no plans to adopt Blu-Ray (even though the BDA has "graciously" extended the offer). Currently, Tosh is not announcing any next gen optical disc roadmaps, but that is probably the last of their worries right now.
So, the final death toll according to Toshiba: Xbox360 add on drives (worldwide) = 300k; PCs with HD DVD (worldwide) = 300k; Standalone players/recorders = 600k (US), 100k (Europe) and 30k (Japan). To quote Engadget, "Add it all up, and that's about a 1.3 million customers -- just a fraction of the 10m+ Blu-ray owners out there -- that got boned on HD DVD. Thanks, Toshiba and Sony!" Thank you, Ryan Block.
7:26 PM
I'm heavily invested in regular old DVDs.....still have a few VHSs on hand as well.
I'm just planning on staying current with out-dated technology.
10:26 AM
Dude, how's it goin? Again I am off topic, but let me know your username on BT.com. Email it to me and I will let you know mine and we can check up on each other training logs. I know right now I am having a hard time fitting a nightly run in with everything else going on in life.