MSNBC says WAIT on Blu Ray

[DayWalker]

NEW YORK - The HD DVD is now the Highly Dead DVD.

Toshiba Corp., creator of the HD DVD, dropped out of the battle Tuesday over the next generation of movie-disc technology and conceded to the rival Blu-ray format from Sony.

It was the biggest battle between two video formats since Betamax lost out to VHS in the 1980s.

In the long run, the end of the latest format war is expected to be good for consumers, who will no longer have to agonize over which technology to choose for high-definition movies, and won't have to go to the trouble and expense of buying two players.

But in the short term, Toshiba's defeat not only leaves 1 million HD DVD customers worldwide with dead-end hardware but also ends a rivalry that kept down prices for players and pushed the Blu-ray group to match the features available on HD DVD players.

Analysts say people interested in getting a Blu-ray player would do well to wait. For one thing, it will take 12 to 18 months for Blu-ray players to become as cheap and full-featured as HD DVD players, which have been selling for just over $100, according to ABI Research.

Many people who did buy HD DVD players did so recently. In fact, Toshiba said the holiday season was its best ever. Stephen Brown, a Huntington Beach, Calif., technology manager who bought an HD DVD player in November, doesn't regret it, even though his wife now calls him "Betamax Brown."

"Just the fact that I could go out and spend $119 or $120 and have a really nice player, that was a no-brainer at that point," he said Tuesday.

Brown said it he will probably look at getting a Blu-ray player in a year or so, when the price comes down to around $150 from about $400 now and various features become standard.

Both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs deliver crisp, clear pictures and sound, a perfect match for the high-definition TVs sets Americans have been rushing to buy for the past two years.

But HD DVD players are also able to connect to the Internet to download trailers and other bonus content for discs, and can have a director or actor provide commentary in a small window while the movie plays.

The studios that supported HD DVD took advantage of these features in innovative if not always very useful ways: Viewers of Universal Studios' "Evan Almighty" HD DVD could shop for ecologically friendly items like recycled toilet paper through their player.

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Blu-ray players capable of showing picture-in-picture — a feature called "Bonus View" — have only just started to appear. So-called BD-Live players, which can take advantage of Internet content, are expected on the market this spring.

The fact that the PlayStation 3 console included a Blu-ray drive is one reason the format eventually won out. Sony Corp. sold 10.5 million PS3 machines since its 2006 debut.

But the real death knell for HD DVD was the last month's decision by Warner Bros. Entertainment to drop the format and release only Blu-ray discs and DVDs.

"That had tremendous impact," Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida said Tuesday in Tokyo. "If we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win."

Warner joined Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox in shunning the HD DVD, leaving Universal and Paramount Studios in the HD DVD camp. Universal on Tuesday said it would "focus" on releasing Blu-ray discs, but did not say if it would cease putting out HD DVDs.

After Warner's announcement, Toshiba was initially defiant. It cut player prices and kept touting the format's benefits. But the bad news kept rolling in. Last week, Netflix Inc. said it would cease carrying rentals in HD DVD. On Friday, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it would stop selling HD DVD players and discs.

Even with the HD DVD out of its way, Blu-ray isn't likely to be the success that the DVD was, given the many viewing options consumers have.

The big advantage of the DVD over broadcast and cable has been that the viewer can choose when to watch what. But that advantage has been eroded by video-on-demand from cable companies, many of which are now in high definition. Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable company, plans to offer more than 1,000 high-def movies this year.

Just last week, Apple Inc. upgraded its Apple TV set-top device to enable downloads of high-definition rental movies from the Internet. Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 game console also shows downloaded HD rentals.

"Blu-ray Disc has passed its first real test by beating HD-DVD," wrote David Mercer, an analyst at Strategy Analytics in London. "But a much bigger challenge now lies ahead if BD is to become as successful as DVD, and content owners, retailers and manufacturers must now demonstrate that they can work together to promote BD effectively."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23243647/page/2/

Have a read fellas...

yes, I know... it is MSNBC... try to talk about the article please

[radgamer420]

LOL What a bunch of sore losers.

[Evoking1230]

I support both
I have both

am I a little p'ed off....yes but meh....i wont be getting rid of my HD-DVD player so its all good

[Doc Evils]

I wouldn't expect nothing less from them.

[hisame]

MS is really trying hard to sell their HD download.
When themself knew it's not even near possible to have it now.
You either get crappy moive through reduced bandwidth.
Or there is simply very little use on board.

[Venger]

What they should have said is that the PS3 is currently the best Blu-ray player on the market, it is one of the cheaper ones and it will be some months before stand alone machines have equal or better features, so for now buy PS3. The PS3 is the only online ready upgradeable Blu-ray player on the market. Maybe they could have said wait on a stand alone player, or buy a PS3 now.

[Pgsley]

I never expect anything other than this kind of stuff from MSNBC

[DayWalker]

I'm gonna go ahead and say none of you read the article before posting!!!!
Way too many responses to quickly after the post.

ah well...

[grcswoosh]

Really nothing that bad or unexpected. Everything it says is pretty much true, although they say it kind of with a whine.

I mean, what do you expect them to say? "As we expected Blu Ray has won because it is better in every possible way"? No

[Aaron]

I read it. And I think MSNBC are being sore losers. But you can't blame them for not saying the PS3 is great... they have to back the Xbox 360.

[dackingdog]

That was a FUD-tastic read. Fud-cellent.

On Dec 31, 2006- I paid $100 blu-ray drive+$100 wifi+$400 console with 60gb(40 more gigs
then competition) with bc standard out of box+browser+ $350-$400 free online for 7-8 years+
dvd upscaler+home+winning format "Blu"+exclusive games not available on ps2/360/pc+ support
from Sony up to 10 years.= all this for $600us.

Holy guacomole!!! I'm jealous of Betamax Brown. I surrender man, YOU win, YOU win.
*runs away crying*

[Eddian!]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23243647/page/2/

Have a read fellas...

yes, I know... it is MSNBC... try to talk about the article please

A whole article talking about what HD-DVD was, a replica of Microsoft's own statements. MSNBC is just disappointing to read... so biased and untrue... just a mean to defend a company thats always surrounded by controversy.

But whatever... Enough people know already about MSNBC's bias...

[Bitbydeath]

Analysts say people interested in getting a Blu-ray player would do well to wait.

I guess MS's Blu-ray players are a ways off from releasing then

[Redrider]

DayWalker: Why do you always find a dark cloud on a GREAT DAY? (just messing with you..)

Actually the article is right for the most part but over plays some of the features of very few HD-DVD titles.

[DayWalker]

DayWalker: Why do you always find a dark cloud on a GREAT DAY? (just messing with you..)

Actually the article is right for the most part but over plays some of the features of very few HD-DVD titles.

i think they make a valid point as far as features and price go...


Hey man- I see news, I share it.

Let's remember that sites like MSNBC is how the mainstream get their news.

[Alpha2]

Like ANY format you have to wait for certain factors to align to make it the defacto successor.

BUT

The only things standing in the way of Bluray becomeing the only format people watch movies on are 1. Price of the movies and 2. having the equipment to take advantage of the format.

Price drops with demand. Demand increases over time as people adopt the technology to utilize the format. I have an HDTV and a Bluray player (PS3) so may demand is high, but I wait for decent pricing. I'm not paying 30bucks for Shoot 'em Up, that's just not even logical. 25 is pushing it, I'll wait for maybe 22 or if I get a coupon for 5 bucks off of 25.

Other people are waiting for other things like price as well. Price of quality HDTVs and the price of bluray players as well as the movies themselves is what decides when bluray becomes the successor. and even with DVD it was 5 years before VHS finaly breathed it's last breath because DVD had to prove it's worth beyond just being a movie format. by becoming a better storage medium over time, having new applications for the technology become readily availible like DVRs so people could record movies on them the same way they would a video tape.

in short Bluray isnt going anywhere now that there's no significant competition but it'll be another 7 years before it replaces DVD.

The End.

[Redrider]

i think they make a valid point as far as features and price go...


Hey man- I see news, I share it.

Let's remember that sites like MSNBC is how the mainstream get their news.

BTW I saw a consumer news brief on the 6:00 PM network news (ABC) and they did not say wait on Blu-Ray, they said: "buy, buy, buy"...........LOL!

Your right they do make valid points about price but they don't tell you that they were selling hardware at a loss and jacking up the price of the movies to compensate! Nor do they mention that the reason Toshiba was selling there HD-DVD players for a loss was because they were badly losing the format war since 1/1/07 and this marketing ploy was the reason that the format war lasted as long as it did.

Nor did they tell you how many HD-DVD movies actually had interactive on line content.......lol

[cyphernaut]

Blu-Ray has even knocked the mighty Castro out of power!! On the day they announced the HD-DVDEAD format Castro announced his retirement... GO BLU!!! Now if we can get MS we will DOMINATE THE WORLD!!

[Anbu_Evolution]

What a bunch of losers. Haters expect Blu-Ray to completely dominate the entire media world the very next day after HD-DVD died out. Get a grip. This kind of thing takes time but slowly and surely, consumers will be educated about high definition and the take over process will slowly begin.
I bet you if HD-DVD was the winner, they would have been like "Quick! Get your HD-DVD player now because Blu-Ray quit!". Sad...everyone is trying to make it sound like both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is not needed simply because their format of choice didn't succeed so now they try to drag the other one down as well. Losers.

[GameSpawn]

But in the short term, Toshiba's defeat not only leaves 1 million HD DVD customers worldwide with dead-end hardware but also ends a rivalry that kept down prices for players and pushed the Blu-ray group to match the features available on HD DVD players.

Analysts say people interested in getting a Blu-ray player would do well to wait. For one thing, it will take 12 to 18 months for Blu-ray players to become as cheap and full-featured as HD DVD players, which have been selling for just over $100, according to ABI Research.

Many people who did buy HD DVD players did so recently. In fact, Toshiba said the holiday season was its best ever. Stephen Brown, a Huntington Beach, Calif., technology manager who bought an HD DVD player in November, doesn't regret it, even though his wife now calls him "Betamax Brown."

"Just the fact that I could go out and spend $119 or $120 and have a really nice player, that was a no-brainer at that point," he said Tuesday.

Brown said it he will probably look at getting a Blu-ray player in a year or so, when the price comes down to around $150 from about $400 now and various features become standard.

Umm...idiots may I point out that the only reason HD-DVD players were around $100 was because they were being subsidized GREATLY. In fact it was Toshiba's very own players that got that low because they were doing anything and everything to try to get their standalone players into the hands of consumers. In reality HD-DVD players are no cheaper to make than Blu-Ray players, considering they are based on very similar technology.

Both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs deliver crisp, clear pictures and sound, a perfect match for the high-definition TVs sets Americans have been rushing to buy for the past two years.

But HD DVD players are also able to connect to the Internet to download trailers and other bonus content for discs, and can have a director or actor provide commentary in a small window while the movie plays.

The studios that supported HD DVD took advantage of these features in innovative if not always very useful ways: Viewers of Universal Studios' "Evan Almighty" HD DVD could shop for ecologically friendly items like recycled toilet paper through their player.

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Blu-ray players capable of showing picture-in-picture — a feature called "Bonus View" — have only just started to appear. So-called BD-Live players, which can take advantage of Internet content, are expected on the market this spring.

OK, first I'll ignore the fact that the nice little blurb in the middle pretty much undermines and invalidates this entire article; most could just stop reading there, but I'll continue. Sure not all Blu-Ray players right now are capable of BD Spec 1.1 or Spec 2.0 for that matter, but in all fairness neither were HD-DVD players when they first came out and they couldn't be updated either because their firmware could not be re-flashed. That aside though, the cheapest Blu-Ray player, the PS3, just happens to be one of the most capable and it supports ALL THREE BD Specs, 1.0 (Basic), 1.1 (Bonus View), & 2.0 (Live). So who is to complain about being left out because of their own poor research, gullibility, and/or bad buying choices? I would be more apt to blame ignorant sales people, but the consumer has to have a little sense before buying into something.

The fact that the PlayStation 3 console included a Blu-ray drive is one reason the format eventually won out. Sony Corp. sold 10.5 million PS3 machines since its 2006 debut.

But the real death knell for HD DVD was the last month's decision by Warner Bros. Entertainment to drop the format and release only Blu-ray discs and DVDs.

"That had tremendous impact," Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida said Tuesday in Tokyo. "If we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win."

Warner joined Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox in shunning the HD DVD, leaving Universal and Paramount Studios in the HD DVD camp. Universal on Tuesday said it would "focus" on releasing Blu-ray discs, but did not say if it would cease putting out HD DVDs.

After Warner's announcement, Toshiba was initially defiant. It cut player prices and kept touting the format's benefits. But the bad news kept rolling in. Last week, Netflix Inc. said it would cease carrying rentals in HD DVD. On Friday, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it would stop selling HD DVD players and discs.

Hey, there is actually part of this article I can agree with. The PS3 did help Sony get Blu-Ray into more consumer hands in a short period of time, essentially planting the seeds of HD-DVD's destruction. The Warner announcement was the first "blooming" of those seeds that helped kick start one hell of a snowball effect. (Man, do I love analogies)

Even with the HD DVD out of its way, Blu-ray isn't likely to be the success that the DVD was, given the many viewing options consumers have.

The big advantage of the DVD over broadcast and cable has been that the viewer can choose when to watch what. But that advantage has been eroded by video-on-demand from cable companies, many of which are now in high definition. Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable company, plans to offer more than 1,000 high-def movies this year.

Just last week, Apple Inc. upgraded its Apple TV set-top device to enable downloads of high-definition rental movies from the Internet. Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 game console also shows downloaded HD rentals.

HD Video on Demand is at maximum broadcast in 1080i, which is barely anything over 720p, and a majority of broadcast HDTV is actually 720p. 1080p broadcasting is still a VERY long ways off. Current broadcast setups (at least in the US) just are not capable of the data throughput needed for 1080p content on a grand scale. This is mostly because it has taken the FCC so **** long to get off their ass and finalize an HDTV broadcasting standard, unlike everywhere else in the world with HDTV broadcasting that has had standards for years now (effectively I'm referring to Europe and Japan).

The nice little part about digital downloads at the end won't be threating Blu-Ray either. Digital downloads have a lot of cons that make Blu-Ray a friendly consumer format. DRM is a plague of anything digitally downloaded and sometimes causes more problems than it's worth; that added to uneducated consumers could lead to very unhappy, frustrated consumers. The other thing bad about digital downloads is the volatility of the data. There is very high chance that the data or its accompanying DRM could be deleted or corrupted, making the content useless. A pressed disc on the other hand, must be physically destroyed to loose the content and thanks to TDK's Tough Coat technology Blu-Ray discs are pretty ****ed durable. The last downside in comparison to a disc format is ease of use. With digital downloads you have to fumble around with different players and codecs, what you have may not be up to par to play the digital download well, yada yada, yada. However with a disc format it is pop-out, put-in, and play; if your player doesn't support the newer BD Specs, those features will be disabled, but the primary content, the HD Film, is still viewable along with any SD or HD bonus material on the disc not associated with BD-Live or Bonus View. Remember Apple already tried digital video downloads with their iTunes service and it flopped worse than a dieing fish.

[lorddct]

MS has been rumored to want HD-DVD and the battle to last till they can perfect the HD download service. This article gives clear hints of that.

But I will have to say it's not going to be the same experience. I never pay for PPV because the quality is just not good enough, and I personally love to own what I have instead of having it all stored on a HD. And Blu-ray and HD-DVD titles are just too beautiful to pass up if done correctly compared to the DVD counterparts.

I won't have the BW for a good HD dling service and I won't settle for anything that will lower the HD quality just so it will stream faster for my internet. I'll be a blu-ray supporter till the end. This isn't like Itunes where one can dled a song in 5 mins, this is a movie which will take anywhere between 10mins - several hrs depending on your internet speed.

[TH3 GAM3]

I read the entire article and it seems that they are still telling consumers to wait although we have a deciding winner. On top of that, they think BD will have a hard time because DD. DD only could go up to 1080i because people don't have the bandwidth for true HD in 1080p.

[Scott64]

I read the entire article and it seems that they are still telling consumers to wait although we have a deciding winner. On top of that, they think BD will have a hard time because DD. DD only could go up to 1080i because people don't have the bandwidth for true HD in 1080p.

I've been telling friends and family to wait on BD as well. I told them to either get a ps3 or wait for panasonic's BD-Live player to be released if they care about the bonus features, and if not, just pick a player.

[PsychoBadBoy]

I think the only reason to wait is for the BD-Live capable players. Other than that, it's all about Blu.

[bobtheduck]

MSNBC, run by microsoft, is trying to get people to hold off on purchasing a bluray player (such as the PS3, competitor to the MS xbox 360?)

No ulterior motives there. None at all. And Digital Distroy. What a load of tosh, for a good number of years.

EDIT: The digital distroy thing was a typo, but it's kind of funny... Not that it makes sense, really, more like a non-sequitur.