The Death Of HD-DVD
The Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD fight that has been going on over the past couple of years has had all the hallmarks of any good format war, mainly that they’re bad for business, and bad for consumers. Getting anybody to go out and invest in your new HD disc format is hard enough, especially when normal DVD’s are already so entrenched. But when there are two competing formats trying to do the same thing, most consumers decide it’s too risky to choose either, and nobody wins.
Thanks to the inclusion in the Playstation 3, along with strong studio support from the start (it helps when you own one yourself), Sony’s Blu-Ray has been seen as the market leader for a while now, although sales of each format weren’t too far apart thanks to HD-DVD players being significantly cheaper. But in the end, price just proved to not be enough, and with a number of announcements this year from people like Netflix, Best Buy and Walmart saying they would only be supporting Blu-Ray, the writing really did seem to be on the wall for HD-DVD.
And then, in a surprising twist, after hundreds of millions of dollars spent, Toshiba took HD-DVD round the back of the barn, and shot it dead. In a press release this week they announced that they would no longer be producing players, discs, or continuing to promote the format.
Wow.
Never before have I seen a company just admit defeat so readily. Formats normally die slowly as less and less people buy them, and stores fill up more and more with their competitors. Sony never pulled the gun on Betamax or Minidisc with quite the same ferocity, they just kept on going as VHS and the Compact Disc rolled over the top of them. But not Toshiba, they knew they were down and there wasn’t really any comeback, so they did the sensible thing both for their shareholders and potential HD format consumers everywhere and simply held up their hands, congratulated the victor, and moved on. And I think you have to applaud them for that.
Now does anybody want to buy a barely used Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on?
