It’s official. BluRay, championed by Sony, has won the high definition DVD format war against key rival HD DVD, championed by Toshiba. Today, Toshiba gave up the fight and declared that the company is shutting down the HD DVD business. Less than 12 months ago, HD DVD appeared to be the winning horse when Microsoft’s XBOX 360 pledged alliance to HD DVD and Toshiba slashed the price of its HD DVD price.
However, Sony who lost the VHS vs Beta war twenty years ago apparently has learnt its lessons. “Content, content, content” must be the mantra playing in the head of Chubachi San (Sony President). True enough, the defection of Time Warner’s Warner Bros to the Blu-Ray camp last month proved to be the clincher and followed by US key retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc, Best Buy Co Inc and online video rental company Netflix Inc.
I suspect Malaysian users have not gotten their fingers burnt as there is little HD-DVD nor Blu-Ray players and discs can be found in the stores. Except of course, the I-must-be-the-first geeks that have forked out thousands to buy HD DVD kits will curse at the obsolete equipments. Very much like I myself who’s scratching my head for what to do with my double-sided-laserdisc player and collection of LDs. Oh yeah… does that mean HD DVD equipped Xbox 360s will be pretty much useless soon? Ouch…
javascript:void(0)
No comments:
Post a Comment