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.
An expensive Blu-ray set-up could see cracked Blu-ray movies loaded onto pirate HD DVD discs instead, something that is reported to already be happening in China, fuelling the demand for HD DVD players and recorders through the black market of piracy at the expense of a much more expensive Blu-ray world.
The market is a funny thing, and doesn’t like being pushed around. HD DVD certainly appears to be mortally wounded, and the defection of Paramount and Universal – if it happens – would hurt even more, but the market – and market manipulation – sometimes makes funny things happen.
HD DVD still has a chance to be the dominant standard for data and video storage on PCs, but only if internal HD DVD burners quickly dropped to the same price as internal DVD burners today, along with pricing blank HD DVDs at the same price as blank DVDs.
If the prices of HD DVD burners didn’t fall, you’d just go for Blu-ray and get the 50GB of storage space instead.
It’s the week after CES, the week after Warner’s Blu-ray bombshell. There’s still plenty of HD DVD out there in computers, in homes, in stores, in warehouses and on manufacturing lines.
But it looks like HD DVD might end up dead as an official movie release format in an attempt to have Blu-ray definitively win over HD DVD.
Still, these moves might be too little, too late for the quick death of HD DVD, even if Paramount and Universal soon dismount. Differences should have been worked out long ago, and all this mess avoided.
In a world where the all important US consumer is suddenly caught up in the sub-prime mess, with worse still predicted to come throughout 2008, draining US consumers (and global consumers, to a degree) of spending power, if HD DVD manages to stay around and is significantly cheaper than Blu-ray, it still has a chance.
If HD DVD gains traction in the PC space, quickly replacing DVD burners, there’ll be plenty of movies on HD DVD - it’s just that none will be official. They’ll have been downloaded, burned to a blank HD DVD disc and played on a cheap HD DVD player, hooked up to a big screen TV.
If that happens, and HD DVD refuses to die, legal movies on HD DVD could well have the biggest comeback since Ben Hur.
And that would be very blue for Blu-ray. There is no winner yet. The Blu-ray and HD DVD show still has quite a few episodes to go yet before we find out if there’s another season!
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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