Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The HD DVD cause has taken so many bullets lately that if it were a ship it would be at the bottom of the ocean by now. However, HD DVD players are dirt cheap (at least in the US) so should consumers take a chance on the format?
At present, support for HD DVD is coming from
four main areas - Toshiba (naturally) and a couple of other player
vendors such as Venturer, Microsoft (which sells an HD DVD add-on for
Xbox 360), a few PC hardware vendors such as HP, Acer and Asustek which
sell HD DVD drives with some systems, and three remaining movie studios
(Universal, Paramount and Dreamworks).
Despite its continued vocal support for HD DVD, Microsoft must now be
getting a little concerned with the increasing depth of the hole it has
dug for the Xbox 360 in the HD video space. In order to get its console
on the market early and at the right price, Microsoft went with a
standard DVD player instead of waiting for the arrival of HD DVD.
Later, as Blu-ray player sales began to outstrip HD DVD player sales
because of the PlayStation 3, Microsoft announced an add-on HD DVD
player for Xbox 360.
However, the add-on player is not a must have for existing Xbox 360
gamers who already have a DVD player in their console and for new
buyers it is an expensive extra that pushes the price of Xbox 360
beyond that of a PS3. To make matters worse, now that Warner Bros has
gone exclusively Blu-ray, the choice of HD titles that an Xbox 360 with
the add-on is capable of playing is severely limited.
Speaking of Warner Bros, its move to Blu-ray has now put pressure on
the three remaining studios supporting HD DVD to switch to Blu-ray.
According to a report in the Financial Times, Paramount is poised to
switch to Blu-ray because it has an escape clause in its contract that
allows it to switch if Warner goes Blu-ray. Paramount for the time
being has said it will stay with HD DVD but would it surprise anyone if
the movie studio was right now discussing the ramifications of
switching to Blu-ray with its legal department?
If Paramount does defect to Blu-ray, that would leave just Universal as
the sole studio making non-animated movies for HD DVD, a situation that
would clearly be untenable for the holdout studio.
Even without Paramount, however, at least 75% of movies released to HD
video from now on will be Blu-ray. Together with the fact that by the
end of the first quarter of 2008, there will be close to 10 million PS3
plus another million or more standalone Blu-ray players in homes, that
would appear to make Blu-ray a safe bet for fence sitting consumers.
As for the PC vendors that currently supply HD DVD drives in their
systems - there is little doubt that if they don't already do so,
they'll gladly supply Blu-ray drives.
So why should I buy an HD DVD player? I don't really know. Perhaps someone out there can supply me with a convincing reason.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
