January sales show HD DVD finished

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 23 January 2008 14:41

Opinion and Analysis

Toshiba, realizing the end is nigh, has commenced a frantic fire sale of players, practically giving away the most advanced HD DVD players on the market in lucrative movie bundling deals. For buyers of HD DVD players, however, there will be an increasingly narrow choice of HD titles, with only Universal and Paramount still churning out non-animated films on HD DVD.

The pundits are now speculating as to when Universal and Paramount are going to call it quits and jump over to Blu-ray. Another month or two of sales figures like the second of January would probably be enough to do the trick.

However, it will be interesting to see what effect the drastic price cuts that Toshiba has announced will have on the market. If it only causes a minor ripple, then that should also be enough to cause the remaining studios backing HD DVD to jump ship sooner rather than later.

Now a quick word on HD downloads, which some have predicted will make the HD format war obsolete anyway. I recently visited Apple.com and had a look at some HD movie trailers in 1080p. They look great but a short trailer is about 150MB. I have a pretty fast cable connection and a monthly download/upload limit of 12GB. Until my Internet service is an order of magnitude or two better than what I have currently, HD movie downloads are simply not a viable proposition.

With that in mind, and the fact that there are already about 10 million Blu-ray players of some shape and form in consumers' homes around the world, I think it's fairly safe to say that Blu-ray looks set to have a good few years run ahead while HD DVD is destined to go the way of Betamax.