Toshiba Paid Off To Drop HD-DVD?

TripleP writes "Was Toshiba paid-off to concede the HD battle? There are some signs that may point to this as a direct result of the ended format war. Reuters has reported that Sony has agreed to sell its Cell and RSX fabrication plants in Japan to Toshiba. The WSJ is reporting that is is a joint venture in the form of 60% Toshiba,%20 Sony and %20 Sony Computer Entertainment Inc."

Who cares

[CastrTroy]

Who really cares. At least the war is over. I was tired of the format war. Neither format really had a real reason to choose one over the other. They were both pretty evenly matched. I just hope that they don't try to kill off DVD now. I'm perfectly happy with DVD, and don't feel like spending more money just to watch movies.

in other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Were they paid to make the same decision that any businessman in the world would have made? Well, maybe the Sony guys picked up the check for the sukiyaki this time, but that's about it.

Re:PS3 = Still Sucks

[CastrTroy]

With the format war over, that may just be enough to make the PS3 really attractive. It worked for the PS2.

Re:Surprised?

[JordanL]

I find it remarkable that people honestly believe a company like Sony can hide payments of over a half billion dollars fromt heir financial statements to shareholders.

Sony won. Get the fuck over it.

Re:Who cares

[CastrTroy]

It's also more expensive, and doesn't really result in higher quality video or sound though. So to the end user, they get the same experience, but it costs more.

Re:Who cares

[Midnight Thunder]

BD requires AACS and ROM-Mark, IIRC. BD players won't play home burned disks, only commercially pressed ones, due to the Rom-Mark and AACS requirements.

Even more reason to wait a few years before going to Blu-Ray. Wait a few years and we will have our players with 'debug' menus that were accidently left it :)

The only place I am tempted to use Blu-Ray is for my home computer, since the extra storage makes for a great back up solution.

Someone must be really pissed off ...

[MattGS]

... that HD-DVD is dead. With all those articles claiming "shady business practices" that led to Blu-Ray winning the format war. I don't care. At least it's over. Yes, I would definitely have prefered no region codes but the end of the format war is a victory for the consumer in any case. And yes, I know that having multiple options to choose from basically means more freedom for the consumer - but what good is this freedom if you had to buy multiple players in the end just to be sure that you would have been able to watch your favourite movie? There would always have been "exclusives" for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD. I, for one, am glad that this is over.

So now please just stop those "Blu-Ray only won because they cheated" articles. If Microsoft *really* wanted to push HD-DVD over downloads what do you think they would have done? They would have shoved it down our throats as well. And our rectums just to be sure. That's just how these things go. It's a dirty business. Liars, thieves, backstabbers, greedy bastards. We all know that. Now let's just be glad that *they* paid for the war and not us.

Well at least not all of us. I am very sorry for those who bought HD-DVD players and feel cheated but come on, early adopters should damn well know the risk. Especially since it was obvious that sooner or later one format would bite the dust.

Disclaimer: I might not be totally neutral since I've wanted to buy a PS3 for quite some time now and Blu-Ray winning was the final reason for me to go for it. But if the format war would have continued I would have waited a while longer I guess.

Re:Standards should be set by engineers, not PHBs!

[foniksonik]

BD isn't a *standard* the way you describe it. Just as CDs are not a *standard*. They are simply a defacto media format for distributing commercial data. Anyone can use them or not for distributing data but there are plenty of alternatives.

Until there is a societal need to have 30GB of data sent out to everyone in a nation or state... on a physical disk media, there simply is no need for a *standard* such as this. It's purely convenience and entertainment. Yes there is a lot of money to be made but no one's life or standard of living is at stake.

Re:Standards should be set by engineers, not PHBs!

[the eric conspiracy]

So where do standards come from if it isn't new products developed by businesses?

Re:Surprised?

[blair1q]

They sell something worth $11.38 billion for 10.75 billion, but never booked it at 11.38 billion in the first place.

Sony shows $10.75 billion in cashflow, no appreciable decrease in assets, and covers it with profits from its new hi-def disc monopoly.

90% of its shareholders are fund, anyway, whose managers won't care as long as their funds still sell, and since SNE is only going to be 0.8% of any one fund, the effect of the graft is a tiny splash buried in the roaring surf of the market.

Sony bought your future. Get the fuck over it.

Dvd isnt going anywhere anytime soon

[voss]

Reasons for DVD staying around for a long time...

1) There are 500 million dvd players versus maybe 12-15 million blu-ray of which 10 million are ps3
2) For most people for the time being, DVD is "cheap and good enough"
3) Cheapest blu-ray $250, cheapest dvd player $18

Re:Who cares

[TheRaven64]

HD-DVD is cheaper to implement

Not exactly. The players cost about the same amount - the expensive part is the blue laser which is used in both. Toshiba had been heavily subsidising their players to counter the PS 3, but it looks like that will be ending soon. More to the point, you could convert a DVD factory to manufacture HD-DVDs more cheaply than converting it to BD. This isn't a huge advantage, however, since the market for DVDs is still huge (and growing) so no one has DVD plants that they want to convert. New plants cost a similar amount for both formats.

Re:Who cares

[zippthorne]

"And not just the last mile, the entire internet isn't set up for it."

The internet is up for it. It's only the last mile that matters. There is more than enough regular bandwidth to serve all the popular movies and music (and approaching all the digitally encoded movies and music...) if you posit multicast and ISP caching.

Re:Who cares

[Lehk228]

hard drives are NOT suitable for long term backup, they just don't do well enough sitting idle for years. i know that BD does include physical protection from scratches, if it also includes specs for chemical resistance it could very well be a good archive format.

Re:PS3 = Still Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps if Sony could decide what features they want to include in the PS3 it would be easier for people to keep it straight. Sure there's only one model that plays no PS2 games at all, but there are several models that play varying degrees of PS2 games. I owned one from just after the switch to software-only emulation and it didn't play the first 3 PS2 games I tried. I returned it the next day. I'll wait until they get their act straight. I'm a fairly agnostic gamer, I own basically every console produced to date since the 2600, but Sony is making it hard for me. The PS3 is like the Forrest Gump of gaming consoles, "you nevah know what you gonna get".