The HD DVD is now the Highly Dead DVD.
Toshiba Corp., creator of the HD DVD, dropped out of the battle Tuesday over the next generation of movie-disc technology and conceded to Sony’s rival Blu-ray format.
It was the biggest battle between two video formats since Betamax lost out to VHS in the 1980s.
In the long run, the end of the latest format war is expected to be good for consumers, who will no longer have to agonize over which technology to choose for high-definition movies and won’t have to go to the trouble and expense of buying two players.
But in the short term, Toshiba’s defeat not only leaves 1 million HD DVD customers worldwide with dead-end hardware but also ends a rivalry that kept down prices for players and pushed the Blu-ray group to match the features available on HD DVD players.
Analysts say people interested in getting a Blu-ray player would do well to wait. For one thing, it will take 12 to 18 months for Blu-ray players to become as cheap and full-featured as HD DVD players, which have been selling for just over $100, according to ABI Research.
Many people who did buy HD DVD players did so recently. In fact, Toshiba said the holiday season was its best ever. Stephen Brown, a Huntington Beach, Calif., technology manager who bought an HD DVD player in November, doesn’t regret it, even though his wife now calls him “Betamax Brown.”
“Just the fact that I could go out and spend $119 or $120 and have a really nice player, that was a no-brainer at that point,” he said Tuesday.
Brown said it he will probably look at getting a Blu-ray player in a year or so, when the price comes down to around $150 from about $400 now and various features become standard.
Both HD DVD and Blu-ray discs deliver crisp, clear pictures and sound, a perfect match for the high-definition TVs sets Americans have been rushing to buy for the past two years.
But HD DVD players are also able to connect to the Internet to download trailers and other bonus content for discs, and can have a director or actor provide commentary in a small window while the movie plays.
The studios that supported HD DVD took advantage of these features in innovative if not always very useful ways: Viewers of Universal Studios’ “Evan Almighty” HD DVD could shop for ecologically friendly items like recycled toilet paper through their player.
Blu-ray players capable of showing picture-in-picture — a feature called “Bonus View” — have only just started to appear. So-called BD-Live players, which can take advantage of Internet content, are expected on the market this spring.
The fact that the PlayStation 3 console included a Blu-ray drive is one reason the format eventually won out. Sony Corp. sold 10.5 million PS3 machines since its 2006 debut.
But the real death knell for HD DVD was the last month’s decision by Warner Bros. Entertainment to drop the format and release only Blu-ray discs and DVDs.
“That had tremendous impact,” Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida said in Tokyo. “If we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win.”
Warner joined Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox in shunning the HD DVD, leaving Universal and Paramount Studios in the HD DVD camp. Universal said it would “focus” on releasing Blu-ray discs but did not say if it would cease putting out HD DVDs.
After Warner’s announcement, Toshiba was initially defiant. It cut player prices and kept touting the format’s benefits. But the bad news kept rolling in. Last week, Netflix Inc. said it would cease carrying rentals in HD DVD. On Friday, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said it would stop selling HD DVD players and discs.
Even with the HD DVD out of its way, Blu-ray isn’t likely to be the success that the DVD was, given the many viewing options consumers have.
The big advantage of the DVD over broadcast and cable has been that the viewer can choose when to watch what. But that advantage has been eroded by video-on-demand from cable companies, many of which are now in high definition. Comcast Corp., the country’s largest cable company, plans to offer more than 1,000 high-def movies this year.
Just last week, Apple Inc. upgraded its Apple TV device to enable downloads of high-definition rental movies from the Internet. Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox 360 game console also shows downloaded HD rentals.
“Blu-ray Disc has passed its first real test by beating HD-DVD,” wrote David Mercer, an analyst at Strategy Analytics in London. “But a much bigger challenge now lies ahead if BD is to become as successful as DVD, and content owners, retailers and manufacturers must now demonstrate that they can work together to promote BD effectively.”
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