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.
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.
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 –…
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