Once Warner Brothers went exclusively Blu-ray, the writing was on the wall. The other rats have jumped from the ship over the course of the past month: Netflix, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart have all dropped support of the format. Now, it’s officially over. Toshiba has thrown in the towel and announced that their next-generation HD home video format, HD DVD, is officially Betamax 2008. Production has halted, prices are being slashed as we speak, and the HD DVD parrot is no more.
The battle has ended, with lots of innocent consumer casualties. That’s the pain and the pleasure of being an early adopter. You can say that you fought the battle, even if you lost, while everyone else stayed out of the trenches. If you win you get to gloat. If you lose, well… to the victor go the next-gen spoils, and that victor on this day is Sony.
Have I beaten that war metaphor enough?
I was kind of hoping HD DVD would pull a miracle upset (if you can call one billion dollar company beating another billion dollar company an upset), but it was not to be. I have serious problems with the way Sony rushed an unfinished format to market and added features as they went along, nor do I relish paying the higher cost for Blu-ray movies, but… what can you do? Sony gambled big by joining Blu-ray and the PlayStation 3 together. It drove the price for the PS3 sky-high and could have killed both their home video and video game console businesses given the high cost of Blu-ray drives, but they eventually found a price point that sold well and they won the day.
Tags: hd dvd, Toshiba, Sony, Blu-ray, format war
Image: Engadget