Toshiba’s Blu-ray Mea Culpa Up Close

@Parentmk: Consumer friendly? Robust? Rich extra features? Have you considered a future in marketing?

dingus

Although technically Sony's Bluray won the format war with HD-DVD. IMHO - I believe its adoption rate will never pick up steam. I see the bluray player like many saw the Laser Disc Player - a bridge technology. In the end the VOD services like Amazon, Netflix, Hulu (to name a few) will rule the next gen... Why - mostly because you won't have to pay and with technology improving, the video and audio quality will only get better. Finally the on demand feature makes it easier and more convenient (no jewel cases to sift through or looking for that missing disc...).

DaShocKer

I still get sad when I think about HD DVD losing the format war, not just because I bought the top of the line Toshiba before it went belly up, but really because I think HD DVD had better features and was much more consumer friendly with price points for the players, and the HD DVDs themselves...couple that with the fact that HD DVDs still have more robust and much more rich extra features than even most Blu-Ray discs today and that to me equates to the consumer losing out to big business yet again.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

@DaShocKer: That is, if some parts of the world will even GET Hulu, Netflix etc. Yes, hi, this is Europe speaking. We don't have Hulu/Netflix because Hulu/Netflix are bitches and ignore us.

@MikeSWelch: I agree especially when BR burners become common and BR media gets down to a $1. The availability of video on the web has created a need for substantial offline storage. When you have a few TB of data and no IT dept to manage it and the backups life becomes difficult. The advent of cheap TB hard drives is not a solution. A binder with 200 50GB disks represents a manageable archive which is portable and secure. BR will be with us until a backwards compatible 500GB optical disk solution comes to displace it.a

ccweems

@MikeSWelch: Or if they had just stuck with HD DVD you wouldn't have had to replace them anyway because they were all backward compatible and would upscale your regular dvds, hence not having to buy anything new at all because they used the same lasers as old players. That also dropped prices substantially lower right off the bat.

Blu Ray won't take off because it won't start coming in all computers (too high of a price for the players and still WAY too high for Blu Ray discs themselves), people don't care so much about the technology, and like DaShocker below me has stated, this is just going to be an expensive media bridge between the VOD services.

@dingus: Well I am an English teacher, but unemployed at this point in time due to the current wonderful budget deficits surrounding all of our public schools...

but thanks for the compliment, I'd take a marketing job at this point! And I still do believe that HD DVD was all of those things that Blu Ray still really isn't.

I don't have all the numbers and facts and frankly don't care to look them up, but I'd love to average out the costs of the HD DVD players and HD DVDs to Blu Ray's stuff even today. I also remember reading a few articles on here how the HD DVD features, even when they first came out, were so much better than anything Blu Ray cared to come up with. I think Blu Ray has improved substantially, but I also can't help to wonder where HD DVD would be now if they had had the chance...

Blu ray will catch just like DVD did.

The PS3 is only the beginning. Once blu ray players start coming in all computers, and players drop below $100 and still play all your old DVDs, everyone will get one.

The best part is not having to replace your DVDs. You can just buy Blu from now on.

MikeSWelch

@MikeSWelch: Yah right

BostonPimpDaddy2

@Eruanno: Sounds like an awesome business oportunity. Get some investors, make a deal with the BBC and start your own hulu. Beat them to it and make a mint.

Brian Richards

@MacAttack7388: If you can't beat 'em, they are not tied down properly. At least in reference to how the BluRay HD DVD war went.

Optimus-Prime

@Parentmk: The bottom line is that the companies should have learned from past mistakes with format wars and just adopted a universal standard. If that would have happened then the people who bought HD DVD players wouldn't have been screwed and Blu Ray wouldn't have been crippled for the first couple years by fighting a format war. We should have cheap players and discs by now.

LEWD98

@Eruanno: Exactly. Get real; the rest of us don't have 100 Mb download speeds. Blu-ray is just fine and dandy with me; you can keep your nonexistent VoD services and shove them *BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP*

Zordon

You know, I looked at this article and went "huh?".

Then I read the comments and figured it out.

Not everyone automatically remembers that Toshiba backed the other standard.

It would have been nice if Gizmodo was a little more in their articles.

Scott Messinger

A lesson in latin: A "mea culpa" is a confession of guilt (as in "I'm culpable").

Toshiba wasn't guilty of anything. They backed a format that was superior in every way except for capacity, but lost because Sony had the dollars and the desperation to fight it out to the bitter end.

No culpability there.

Bob Reddert

@Parentmk: Mis-read. Never mind.

@Bob Reddert: That argument doesn't hold water. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray support the same video codecs, and Blu-Ray has supported higher bit rates. HD had stricter audio requirements, and better interactivity in the beginning, but BD in its current state has eclipsed HD-DVD.

Sony started work on the Blu-Ray spec way before HD-DVD. If one looks back properly, you'll recall that HD-DVD was rushed to market. The first run of players didn't even support 1080p!

@Scott Messinger: The related article sidebar is what it took to clue me in.

Sony won because of one really, really smart decision, built into the PS3 standard. If microsoft had sucked it up and put a HD-DVD drive in the 360 they would have won, and this post would be about sony making their first HD-DVD player.

mustanganator