"An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." - Arthur Miller

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Death of HD-DVD Press Conference

Toshiba held a press conference and announced that HD-DVD is finally dead and gone. After reading off a press release stating the obvious, a brief Q&A was held. As for why HD-DVD failed, that was blamed on the switch of Warner Bros to the Blu-Ray camp. Toshiba currently doesn't have plans for Blu-Ray or another next gen disc and instead will work on next generation of NAND flash memory.

As far as HD-DVD players sold, "600,000 players in the US -- 300,000 of which were Xbox 360 HD DVD drives. 100,000 units were sold in Europe. And about 10,000 players and 20,000 recorders in Japan. So about 730,000 units worldwide." Also Toshiba plans on buying enough HD-DVD discs for Japanese HD-DVD recorder and sell them online.

So there you go, Blu-Ray is king. Now I am just going to wait on that rumored PS3 price drop now that they developed a smaller chip. No rush anyway for next gen as have entirely too many DVDs as it is.

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