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Ding Dong, HD-DVD is Dead

6 Comments Published by Matthew Jeppsen February 18th, 2008 in Formats, News, Storage

Rest in Peace, HDDVD. The future is BluFollowing the news of Blockbuster, Best Buy, Netflix and Warner Brothers backing Blu-Ray, it appears that the blue-laser has won the HD disc format war. According to multiple sources, Toshiba is pulling the plug on HD-DVD manufacturing and marketing. All that’s left is an official announcement from the consortium of HD-DVD backers. While this development is bad for early adopters who chose HD-DVD, it is a Good Thing for the industry and consumers in general. Regardless of the differing features they offered, having two formats to choose from has stalled adoption of the high-definition discs. I personally know a number of production companies that have been waiting for a clear winner before going ahead with plans to deliver HD content to clients. I, for one, welcome our new Blu disc overlords.

6 Responses to “Ding Dong, HD-DVD is Dead”  

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  1. 1 DG3 Feb 18th, 2008 at 4:45 pm

    I can’t imagine how much further along we’d be with high-definition content delivery if this whole thing never started in the first place.

  2. 2 Anthony Burokas Feb 18th, 2008 at 8:40 pm

    Agreed. It’s hard to deliver HD to clients when they, themselves, don’t know what to buy because no one wanted to buy something only to have it unsupported in 6 months. I think Sony is going to have a very good year with all the pent-up HD recordable demand finally having a clear path to follow.

    Now if they can just give us home blu-ray video recorder decks like they have in other countries… I hope we don’t have to wait many years for optical home video recorders like we did with DVDs.

    Anthony

  3. 3 martin Feb 18th, 2008 at 9:07 pm

    It was on the news this evening!

  4. 4 Andreas Feb 19th, 2008 at 1:10 pm

    It would be great if you could explain a little bit what this means for the independent video producer. Phillip Hodgets said something on the Digital Production Buzz, that this isn’t good news for the indies as one has to pay licence fees of $2500 per disk.

    Is that true in general or only if you want the DRM system ? What does it mean for the content creators or the home users ?

    Would be great if you could shed some light on it.

    Thanks
    Andreas

  5. 5 Matthew Jeppsen Feb 19th, 2008 at 5:55 pm

    The way I understand it, if you want copy protection on your disc (ala DVD’s CSS), you need to purchase a license when you have your run of discs replicated. And yes, that is somewhere north of $2K. Where it gets sticky is that player manufacturers are supposed to require AACS protection on a disc. No AACS, no play. However, at least a few mfrs have come out with player firmware updates that enable BD-R playback (that is, without AACS protection, therefore no license fee). I am unsure of the legalities of all this for either side. Here is a thread at Creative Cow on the topic, perhaps it will shed some light: http://blogs.creativecow.net/node/248

    -Matt Jeppsen

  6. 6 Jim Bartell Feb 20th, 2008 at 2:50 pm

    Of course, they were just waiting for me to get the HD-DVD drive for my Xbox 360 for Christmas.

    Sigh.

    Jim Bartell