Toshiba Paid Off To Drop HD-DVD? 229
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."
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
Surprised? (Score:3, Interesting)
Along with the $120M paid to Fox at the last minute to get them to stick with BD, and the reputed $400-500M WB received, I'm not shocked at all.
Sony bought the win in the format war, and that alone would be enough of a reason to not buy into the inflated BD format. (Inflated as in cost)
money flow (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Who cares (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyway, the Java-based scripting language is certainly a good thing for Blu-Ray, and I imagine there'll be a full featured open source HD-player a lot sooner because of it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Interesting)
This is why I've always favored BluRay. From my limited understanding of the subject, I can see that it is a little bit more modern of a technology, so it has higher potential.
Standards should be set by engineers, not PHBs! (Score:5, Interesting)
What going around these days is crap, and it's come right back at us!
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
Incredibly stupid headline (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Who cares (Score:2, Interesting)
eg. I was just watching a programme on Hulu. I have an 8mb connection with a good ISP (can sustain about 7.1mb 24/7.. I pay for the privilege though) and still, given the really low resolution the hulu uses, every few minutes the programme would begin stuttering as it couldn't keep up. Their HD stuff is just unusable.
99% of consumers are on cheap ISPs that have low sustainable bandwidth, 'fair use' caps, shaping, etc.. they'd have zero chance. That isn't going to change - in fact it's getting worse, as ISPs drop prices they're overselling their bandwidth more and more.
For streaming even to be viable for the general population you'd have to be talking about sustaining about 8=12mb to every household at the same prices that the average consumer pays now. Which would in turn require massive ugrades to the infrastructure. The maths don't work - who's going to pay for this?
What's happening is there's a building crisis. Apple in the US and the BBC in the US are increasing the ISPs costs at no cost to themselves. The bandwidth isn't there for these services to become too popular - and neither Apple nor the BBC are paying for it.. at some point it'll hit critical mass - either the ISPs will start throttling video services, or they'll split the accounts allowing video download on only higher priced tariffs (much like the mobile phone companies have done from the start), or worst case they'll cut them off altogether.
That's without even considering HD.. the end users simply don't have the ability to download 20gb+ of HD data and won't for years (the apple thing is so compromised it only gets to be called HD on a technicality).
Re:Who cares (Score:1, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently saw a 1000GB SATA-RAY disc demonstrated. Actually I even saw it for sale. Slightly thicker than the plastic, but I can live with that.
Seriously tho, judging from the development, sale and prices of ordinary multilayer DVDs, I expect the new optical formats to remain permanently impractical and inferior as a storage medium as compared to simply buying more harddisks. They haven't been designed as data storage, they've been designed with the primary purpose of gathering shelf-dust in stores and at home. With the rapid spread and expansion of USB drives and memory sticks I doubt they'll manage to gather as extensive use as backup and transportation medium as the older optical formats.
I care, I admit to owning a HD-DVD player (Score:3, Interesting)
So now we have a standard. Big deal, Blu-Ray/Sony isn't trying to compete with DvD and unless other makers join in I doubt it will come down anytime soon. Plus as others have posted BluRay has all sorts of issues with drm/restrictions/etc...
at least with HDDVD I could play the freaking movie when I wanted to...
Re:Dvd isnt going anywhere anytime soon (Score:3, Interesting)
It's equivalent to early DVDs, though. Remember getting some of those early discs and seeing excessive film grain? That was the first thing I thought of when I got my HD DVD player. I've seen the same thing on other peoples' Blu-Ray players as well.
If you're a movie junkie and have to have high def right away, by all means go right ahead. If you don't like staring at crappy transfers, though, you ought to wait.
Re:Dvd isnt going anywhere anytime soon (Score:2, Interesting)
Price differences drop over time, especially when the only real differences are a laser and a bit of software.