There’s confusion surrounding the pending high-def release of There Will Be Blood. The movie, which will be released here in the U.S. by Paramount on HD DVD, was scheduled for an April 8 release. Then it disappeared from Paramount’s site. Axed?
No. Hardly.
Apparently Paramount was just restructuring its Web site to reflect a new March 4 release detail embargo. Basically, until March 4 you won’t hear a damn thing about its release.
There Will Be Blood is one of the highest profile HD DVD releases due this Spring. (Others include Bee Movie, Sweeny Todd and Into the Wild.) So despite Toshiba’s throwing in the towel, certain studios here will support the format for a little while longer. Don’t trash your player just yet.
Paramount Nixes ‘There Will Be Blood’ HD DVD? (UPDATED) [High Def Digest]
Looks like the rumor was true.
Product Page [Best Buy]
The old man CmdrTaco over at Slashdot has a notion that Toshiba’s final dropping of HD DVD was due to a little old-fashioned backscratching. Sony is selling parts of some of the chip plants it owns in Japan to Toshiba, giving Tosh 60% interests in an RSX and a Cell chip plants. This is money in Toshiba’s pocket.
It’s not a direct kickback, but it would be sort of a carrot as opposed to the stick, and dropping HD DVD was perhaps part of the overall negotiation. Sony flexed its muscles, Toshiba caved in.
Toshiba paid off to drop HD-DVD? [Slashdot]
Microsoft has just discontinued their HD DVD players for the XBox 360. Microsoft chose… poorly.
As a result of recent decisions made by Toshiba, Hollywood studios, and retailers, Microsoft plans to withdraw from HD DVD. Xbox will no longer manufacture new HD DVD players for the Xbox 360, but we will continue to provide standard product and warranty support for all Xbox 360 HD DVD Players in the market. As we stated earlier, we do not believe this decision will have any material impact on the Xbox 360 platform or our position in the marketplace. HD DVD is one of the several ways we offer a high definition experience to consumers and we will continue to give consumers the choice to enjoy digital distribution of high definition movies and TV shows directly to their living room, along with playback of the DVD movies they already own.
via GamerScore
Let’s say the raptors are Blu-Ray.
First, a quote from the Yankee Group’s Carl Howe:
…Two of the big supporters of HD DVD were Microsoft
and Intel, each of whom could account for exactly zero million HD DVD
drive sales. Whenever I see “Barney alliances” — ones where no money
changes hands, but all the partners agree to love each other and their
technologies — I always consider it a sign that the partnership is
going to fail.
Friends, this is absolutely true. Consider the many “partnerships” we’ve heard of in the past few years. Microsoft’s “openness” lip service is an excellent example as is the vaunted Android “alliance” of over 5,250 companies all working hard to produce red hot phones for us. No one in each of these situations stands to gain much from their involvement and there is no reason to stay in the agreement when the going gets tough. HD DVD isn’t the first of these partnerships to fail and it won’t be the last, so keep your eyes open, kids. When money doesn’t change hands it’s a sure sign that they’ve assigned the project to some summer interns and will shut it down when they go back to school.
Barney Alliances and the Downfall of HD DVD [Wired]
A retailer actually giving a damn about its customers? It can’t be an American one, right?
No. It’s not.
Japanese corp Edion, which owns a bunch of electronic stores over there, will exchange customers’ now obsolete HD DVD players for Blu-ray players. The corp will accept Toshiba players for one from Sony, Panasonic or Sharp.
Edion understand that some of its customers were burned by that whole stupid format war and that they “can no longer use their purchases properly.”
Now let’s see if any domestic retailers make similar offers.
Honest / insane retailer swaps old HD DVD for new Blu-ray gear [Digital World Tokyo]
Press Release (in Japanese) [Edion]
Flickr’d
Rumors point to a massive price drop for the Xbox 360’s HD DVD add-on. As a result of the format’s death, Microsoft will tell retailers to let the drive go for $50, a full $80 off the previous price. Why exactly you’d spend $50 on an outdated, dead technology I don’t know. You’re better off playing Mega Millions or going to the dog track.
Actually, hold that thought. $50 isn’t bad if you already have an established HD DVD library and want to use the drive as a backup in case your main player drops dead.
Right now. all the major retailers’ Web sites still show the $130 price tag. Maybe it’s slow coming.
Mole report: Xbox 360 HD DVD drive for $49.99 [ars technica]
The above picture pretty much explains it all. CompUSA is clearing everything out and here’s your chance to cash in. It’s only the 720p player but when you factor in the seven movies it’s not too bad a deal at $90. But you want the 1080p player don’t you? Yeah, I thought so. There’s even a deal on a 1080p Vizio. Check it out after the jump.
Thanks for sending this in Alex C.
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Oh John C. Dvorak, I could read your stuff all day long. And your weekly web show, Cranky Geeks, keeps me looking forward to Wednesdays now, if only to catch a fleeting glimpse of the crankiness that’ll undoubtedly ensue.
Now the crankiness has spilled over into the HD DVD versus Blu-ray thing. The very thing that I, believe you me, am sick of writing about, hearing about, and reading, yet I can’t pass up a good old Dvorak word-tantrum.
The basic premise of his latest column is that “this whole thing was a Microsoft scheme to mess with Sony.” Mm-hmm.
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Hold your horses, sports fans. Don’t go declaring Blu-ray the winner of anything just yet, despite the fact that Toshiba original story titlethrew in the towel this week. Sony and the rest of the Blu-ray camp still has one more foe they need to tackle—perception. The perception that regular DVD is “good enough” and that Blu-ray is too expensive.
Contacting a Chicago retailer, Bits finds that demand for Blu-ray in the now post-HD-DVD world isn’t any higher. The retailer warned Sony not too get too cocky and charge exorbitant prices for Blu-ray even though it’s now the de-facto standard in high-def discs. If people can buy a —here’s that phrase again—”good enough” DVD player for $75 and discs for $15, why should they have to shell out hundreds of dollars for a Blu-ray player (even if it plays video games) and pay a premium for the actual movies? Joe Consumer isn’t made of money; videophiles are but they hardly constitute a major portion of the population.
Sony shouldn’t abuse its position in the market now. Rather, it needs to focus on lowering prices or it will find itself with an expensive toy that only a few people give a damn about.
Blu-ray Won the Battle. Now Comes the War [Bits New York Times Blog]
GameStop will stop accepting all HD DVD trade-ins later today. It’ll stop accepting the 360’s HD DVD player for trade-ins, too.
Story.
This past Christmas I traded in unopened HD DVDs that I had received throughout the year and traded them into Best Buy, getting some store credit in the process. Good thing I did that when I did because with the death of the format comes the death of scams like mine. Oh well, I still have a few Blu-rays I can hawk.
GameStop begins halting HD DVD movie trade-ins [QJ.net]
Now here’s something to think about: Now that HD DVD is dead, do you see anything wrong with HD DVD disc owners breaking the DRM on their discs to make backups of the media that they’ve bought in an effort to future-proof their investments?
Think about it: when you buy a disc, whether a DVD or CD, you’re really paying for a copy of what’s on the disc more than the physical media. So if you’ve paid for the media, but the playback mechanism is a deprecated format, shouldn’t you be allowed to make that media usable to you, even if it means breaking DRM?
Or, conversely, when you purchase media on a disc, it could be said you’re entering a contract with the rights holders saying that you’ll only play back from that media, and if the format expires, well, tough crackers?
So I put it to you, our readers: Should HD DVD disc owners be exempt from the DMCA in order to salvage content they’ve paid for? Or are they screwed for being brave, but foolhardy, early adopters?
Let’s hear what you’ve got to say, either in the comments here, or if you’ve got a larger argument, we invite you to sound off on BFF.
Holy crap, this almost seems like more trouble than it’s worth but if you’re looking to convert your “old” HD DVDs to Blu-ray, Wired’s How-To Wiki has got you covered. You’ll need a fast Windows machine, an HD DVD drive, a Blu-ray burner, 30GB of hard drive space, money, and a bunch of software.
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Kick ass cover by Willie, BTW
LG will not give up on selling hybrid players says UK’s pocket-lint, following in the footsteps of folks like Samsung. Expect more of these “announcements” to come out in the next few days as HD DVD backers scramble to retool their factories to produce hybrid or Blu-Ray only players.
“With the recent announcement from Toshiba, Blu-Ray will now be the format that will pave the way for high definition movies, however this does not rule out HDDVD immediately as there are still a number of consumers who have chosen HDDVD and begun to build a HDDVD collection.”
LG not dumping HD DVD [Pocket-lint]
Okay you guys, listen up for a second. I’ve got some bad news. It’s been a long and winding road and we’ve all fought really hard, but it appears that HD DVD might actually be on its way out for real. We just got word that Onkyo has decided to stop making HD DVD players. I know you feel. I feel like I got punched in the gonads, too.
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Not that Sony needed to respond to Microsoft’s press release over the demise of HD DVD, but they did anyway. Dave Karraker, senior director fo corporate communications for Sony Computer Entertainment America, had this to say:
“It’s unfortunate that Microsoft’s external HD-DVD drive will not enhance the experience at all for the gamer. Sony realizes that to truly take gaming into the next generation requires a larger data format for both games and movies. PS3 uses the Blu-ray format for gaming, giving developers 50 GB of high-definition storage on a single disc, while Microsoft’s 9 GB DVD gaming format is an obstacle for storing HD content. Furthermore, Microsoft’s announced HD games patch is really just a compatibility feature — upscaling lower-resolution content does not make it Full HD (1080p), something that PS3 can do out of the box.”
Sony Responds to HD-DVD Announcement [Kotaku]
[Update]: I’m not entirely sure how my RSS reader picked this one up as new (I was bitching earlier about how slow it was being, too), but it’s somewhat serendipitous that it did. It just goes to show how in-tune Sony was from the beginning. However, in no way was the HD DVD drive meant to enhance the experience for gamers. Storage is king and the PS3 obviously has the edge, but what will Microsoft do from here? I don’t believe they will concede and begin to add Blu-ray drives to the Xbox platform. They could, however, offer an add-on drive like they did with HD DVD, but that too is unlikely. Downloadable HD content is more than likely the direction the Redmond giant is headed towards. Maybe Microsoft had a tiny bit more insight than Sony on this supposed format war.
To those of you who can’t accept the news that HD DVD is gone I recount to you the tale of one of my father’s co-workers, Don, who was a die-hard Betamax user.
This was back in 1989 or so when VHS pretty much ruled the day. Consumers were already buying VHS camcorders and I believe we already had a VCR by then, brought home with great fanfare by my parents and relegated to the TV nook where only my sister and I used it. This, kids, was long before CE devices were sexy and powerful and required a Doctorate in Physics to install. You got the VCR, ran it between your TV and cable box, and watched as it blinked “12:00″ incessantly.
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It’s in our inbox, so that’s good enough for us to call it. At 12:14AM PST, HD DVD is no longer supported by Toshiba, effectively killing the format. The release says that Toshiba will focus instead on “championing consumer access to HD content”.
No more players, no more disks, no more HD DVD.
So now we can all buy our PS3s and wait for the day when Transformers shows up on Blu-ray, the official next gen disc format for HD video.
Press Release
We’ve covered this extensively already and know that Blu-ray has won the physical HD media war, but it’s being reported that Toshiba may make an official announcement as early as tomorrow. All Toshiba HD DVD hardware including stand alone players and optical drives will become non-existent on retailer shelves by March.
In the same realm of news, Samsung has announced they will shift their focus from a dual-format standpoint to just Blu-ray. Samsung was smart to play the dual-format card in this war. At least they didn’t waste too much money on HD DVD.
Microsoft sure has a crack team of wordsmiths in their PR department.
We do not believe the recent reports about HD DVD will have any material impact on the Xbox 360 platform or our position in the marketplace. As we’ve long stated, we believe it is games that sell consoles and Xbox 360 continues to have the largest next-gen games library with the most exclusives and best selling games in the industry. We will wait until we hear from Toshiba before announcing any specific plans around the Xbox 360 HD DVD player. HD DVD is one of the several ways we offer a high definition experience to consumers and we will continue to give consumers the choice to enjoy digital distribution of high definition movies and TV shows directly to their living room along with playback of the DVD movies they already own.
Downloadable content FTW!
