The High-Def movie war

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By Joshua O’Neal

Blu-Ray Disc or HD DVD? You can now call off the fight because on February 19 Toshiba, the leading manufacturer of HD DVD players, announced that it will no longer support the HD DVD format. Warner Bros, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Netflix and Blockbuster have all jumped ship to Sony’s Blu-Ray format.

“The sudden change by Warner Bros was like a bolt from the blue,” Toshiba CEO Atsutoshi Nishida said during a news conference at the Toshiba headquarters in Tokyo. “We had no more prospect of winning this competition.”

He refused to say how much money Toshiba would lose from leaving the HD DVD market, but it would not be a considerable loss, seeing how the company made $60.3 billion in sales last year.

Even though Blu-ray has won the battle, is there a reason to not purchase an HD DVD player? A Blu-ray player will run you about $300-$400, and the HD DVD stand-alone player costs $300 as of right now. Eventually, there will be a price drop for HD DVD players and their movies, so if you are into the right-now, go for HD DVD. By this time next year it will be dirt-cheap and it will also upscale your regular DVD movies.

Now that HD-DVD is no longer a competitor, who is Sony’s next rival? The biggest problem for Sony could be digital distribution, with Microsoft selling full HD movies and television shows through their Xbox Live service via the Xbox 360. On March 6, 2007, the “South Park” episode “Good Times with Weapons” was available free for download.

TV shows will be saved permanently to your game system’s hard drive, while movies will remain only rentals. The shows will become unwatchable after 24 hours of viewing or 14 days after purchase. Also, iTunes has started allowing the purchase of movies and TV shows via their iTunes store. The entire Season One of “Fraggle Rock” for $34.99? Yes, please.

If you’re a home-entertainment junkie who has to get all the cutting edge stuff, then I suggest you go for the Blu-ray player since it is currently the best product on the market.

If you want the future, then that is digital distribution. Soon we will live in a world where everything is sent to us via our computers. Movies will be distributed through our computer screens and no longer will there be large piles of movies that we have collected over the years. That cool new movie you have been wanting to see will only be a double click of your mouse away.

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Originally Published: Issue 598 - February 27, 2008

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