Toshiba

I have to hand it to fellow analyst Rob Enderle. Way back in August of 2005, he called the high-def format war in a piece titled "Blu-ray Wins or Nothing Does."

Then again, he also said in that article that "the more likely outcome is that the market will bypass both products and move to something else," so perhaps he wasn't perfectly prescient.

And come to think of it, a year later (in December 2006) he changed his mind entirely in columns titled "Optical HD Battle May Be Over: HD DVD Wins," "… Read more

Tuesday's announcement from Toshiba that it is pulling its support of the HD DVD format and ceasing production of the video players effectively stamps Sony as the new standard bearer of high-definition video.

Sony has long been associated with the Blu-ray Disc format, but HD DVD's demise brings new opportunity for the Japanese electronics maker to effectively take control of the future of high-definition in consumers' living rooms.

The fall of HD DVD gives Sony a chance to really extend its high-definition strategy with the pieces it already has in place: It's the only major consumer electronics … Read more

Clearly seeing the writing on the wall, Universal said today it will drop its support for HD DVD and instead produce its high-definition films on Blu-ray Disc.

"The path for widespread adoption of the next-generation platform has finally become clear," said Craig Kornblau, president of Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Universal Pictures Digital Platforms, in a statement.

"The emergence of a single, high-definition format is cause for consumers, as well as the entire entertainment industry, to celebrate. While Universal values the close partnership we have shared with Toshiba, it is time to turn our focus to releasing … Read more

The two-year war between HD DVD and Blu-ray officially ended Tuesday morning as Toshiba waved the white flag and declared it would stop producing HD DVD products.

The company, which began sales of HD DVD in March 2006 with the HD-A1 player, "decided it was not right for us to keep going with such a small presence," said chief executive Atsutoshi Nishida. The Blu-ray format is now the definitive winner in the war and stands unopposed as the optical media replacement for DVD.

Toshiba's news release goes into a bit more detail: "Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe, yet will continue to make efforts to meet customer requirements. The company will continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives within the overall PC business relative to future market demand."

Three movie studios currently support HD DVD--Universal, Paramount, and DreamWorks Animation--but we expect them to follow suit and announce support of Blu-ray sooner rather than later. Update: All of these studios have indeed followed suit.

… Read more

Well, that's it. Toshiba appears to be pulling the plug on HD DVD. Toshiba has not commented publicly, but a report on Japan's NHK says Toshiba has made the decision to withdraw from next generation high-definition DVD production.

This news certainly doesn't come as surprise to anyone remotely following HD DVD's format war with rival Blu-ray. HD DVD had suffered a string of defections, with Warner, Netflix, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart all recently pledging their alliance to Blu-ray.

The NHK report says existing HD DVD products will remain on the market for a while, but Toshiba … Read more

In the wake of a series of technical announcements from flash memory supplier SanDisk, larger-capacity solid-state drives are on the way.

Flash memory is gaining as a replacement for hard drives in ultra-thin, ultra-small notebooks such as the MacBook Air and Asus Eee PC. Why? Flash uses less power, generates less heat, and has faster access times than hard drives. The Air, for example, offers a 64GB flash-based SSD as an option while the Eee PC is sold standard with flash storage.

There is a big catch, though. High-capacity SSDs are expensive. Prohibitively so. The flash drive in the pricier $… Read more

Word was out this morning that Netflix was giving up on HD DVD, but now Netflix is getting personal about it. I just received the following e-mail:

You're receiving this e-mail because you have asked to receive high-definition movies in the HD DVD format. As you may have heard, most of the major movie studios have recently decided to release their high-definition movies exclusively in the Blu-ray format. In order to provide the best selection of high-definition titles for our members, we have decided to go exclusively with Blu-ray as well.

While we will continue to make … Read more