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The HD DVD and Blu-ray war is over

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Technology

Feb 18, 2008 11:02 am Feb 18, 2008 11:02 am

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Toshiba will no longer support the HD DVD format and will stop producing HD DVD players and recorders. An official announcement is expected on Tuesday, 19February. According to analysts, the format war ended back in January 2007 when Warner announced it would stop releasing HD DVDs, after which the format’s failure was only a matter of time. The Blu-ray and HD DVD war has been going on since 2006

Toshiba will no longer support the HD DVD format. According to Reuters, citing the Japanese broadcasting corporation NHK, Toshiba is going to stop research and development in this area, as well as the production of HD DVD players and recorders.

Toshiba officials say no concrete decision has been made yet, but the company is close to going out of business. According to the Associated Press, citing people familiar with the matter, the final decision is likely to be made by the board of directors on Tuesday, February 19. The market received this news positively. Toshiba shares rose 6.3%. If the decision is positive, the HD DVD camp will lose a key player, so Blu-ray will automatically become the high definition standard. One of the main investors in Blu-ray technology is the Japanese Sony, so the shares of this corporation have also grown. The value of Sony shares, following the news of Toshiba’s decision, rose by 2.1%.

“Further investment [in HD DVD] by Toshiba is pointless,” says Daiwa SB Investments analyst Koichi Ogawa (Koichi Ogawa). The company must reduce losses and focus on more promising areas.” Toshiba is expected to focus on the production of computer chips, including memory. According to the Japanese newspaper Nikkei, the company plans to invest $16.7 billion to build two new flash memory manufacturing plants in Japan during fiscal year 2008.

Toshiba Ends High Definition War

At the beginning of the year, Warner Brothers announced that it would stop releasing movies on HD DVD and switch exclusively to Blu-ray from May. According to analysts, it was this decision that marked the turning point in the format war that had lasted since 2006. After Warner left, only two of the seven largest film studios would remain in the HD DVD camp: Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures. The largest investor in HD DVD technology, apart from Toshiba, is Microsoft. The Blu-ray camp is led by Sony.

According to the NPD Group, following Warner’s announcement in the United States over the next week, 93% of all HD players purchased were Blu-ray devices. In the last three months of 2007, Blu-ray recorders accounted for 96% of the Japanese HD market (source: BCN).

Alexander Semenov, Korus Consulting: The consequences of changes for business will stretch for many more years

Business

At the end of January, some retail chains began redevelopment of retail space, after which the Blu-ray format began to allocate more space. British retailer Woolworths has announced that it will stop selling HD DVDs as of March 2007, becoming the first major retailer to phase out HD DVDs entirely.

Last week, Netflix announced its intention to stop distributing HD DVD media. Best Buy has said it has no intention of phasing out the format entirely, but buyers will have to work hard to get to the shelves with HD DVD, as most of the retail space will be dedicated to Blu-ray. Wal-Mart, the largest retail chain, will sell HD DVDs and players until the summer of 2008, and will switch to Blu-ray from June.

The HD format war is often compared to the battle between VHS and Betamax (the latter developed and promoted by Sony) in the 1980s. In the end, VHS won mainly due to the fact that this particular format was preferred by retailers, to whom buyers went for low prices.

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Video and DVD of the week with Stas Tyrkin

Komsomolskaya Pravda

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LeisureCulture: Video and DVD of the week with Stas Tyrkin

Stas TYRKIN

October 22, 2009 1:00

Beethoven. Big Throw, Sex Drive, Antichrist, Iron Cross

Beethoven. The Big Roll

Directed by Mike Eliot

Cast: Jonathan Silverman, Jennifer Finnigan, Moiser Arias, Eddie Griffin

* * *

Ah, why didn’t the screenwriter’s house sound like Schubert’s or Stravinsky’s music during his creative upsurge?! Such, really, is the popularization of the half-forgotten names of the classics! How lucky Beethoven is – how unlucky everyone else is. When your last name is called a St. Bernard from a slobbering children’s movie – isn’t this a true sign of success? Ludwig van can relax. He did his job. And even if the generation that has grown up with the namesake movie series does not realize that he is the author of the Ninth Symphony. For them, Beethoven is paws, ears and tail. Well, and, perhaps, saliva, picturesquely dripping from his mouth. And in the new series, Beethoven, who has become a homeless dog, is capable of a big throw – to Hollywood. There he intends to make a star career along with lizards and other amphibians.

Sex Drive

Directed by Sean Enders

Cast: Josh Zuckerman, Amanda Crew, Seth Green

* * *

Another summer youth comedy film has as its hero another 18-year-old guy who dreams of breaking up with virginity. For what purpose, together with friends, he goes on a trip across the country. But on the way to the busty girl, whom he met on the Internet, so many funny and important things will happen to him that this journey will literally turn his whole life upside down. To such an extent that even with innocence to part with will not want.

Antichrist

Directed by Lars von Trier

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

* *

The most scandalous film of the last Cannes Film Festival is pseudo a philosophical horror film about a married couple who fled to the forest to heal spiritual wounds, after a child fell out of the window during another copulation. Flavored with porn and scenes savoring self-mutilation, the picture ends with the caption: “Dedicated to Andrei Tarkovsky.” As a person, Trier can deify Tarkovsky (from whom, in his words, he shamelessly stole all his life) as much as he likes, and continue to use The Mirror and other works of the Russian director as poppers to spur inspiration. As an artist, he – willingly or unwittingly – drives an aspen stake into the coffin with the decomposed corpse of the symbolic religious-metaphorical cinema of the last third of the last century. It is him that he burns at the stake of his madness. It is with him that he is dealt with with such frenzy with the help of a set of a young locksmith. And the woman declared by the Antichrist (at least with a capital letter, at least with a small letter) just turned up under his arm.

Iron Cross

Directed by Sam Peckinpah

Cast: James Coburn,

Maximilian Schell, James Mason

* * * *

90 002 The action of this military epic by the cult American Sam Peckinpah (he is considered one of his correspondence teachers Quentin Tarantino) takes place in 1943 on the Eastern Front. In the center of the plot is the confrontation between two Nazi officers: a battle-hardened veteran and a newly arrived novice aristocrat who dreams of achieving the highest German military award, the Iron Cross, by all means. One of the landmark achievements of the war film genre, unfairly forgotten and remained in the shadows until recently. 9* * * * * – brilliant! The online publication (website) is registered by Roskomnadzor, certificate El No. FS77-80505 dated March 15, 2021

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