"Work with remaining HD-DVD content partners to cut disc prices in half. "

Are you serious? Even that isn't worth it to HD DVD!! The whole purpose of a new format is to make more money. Seriously?

"And I bet you sold more discs than your Blu-Ray adversaries" Again, seriously? You saw that blu was minimal 60:40 during xmas sometimes bigger. Harry Potter was the ultimate test and it sold more on blu. Really? What are you looking at?

/quote/

My suggestions for survival are:

Run a two month sale on all HD-DVD players that, via a rebate directly from Toshiba, making their final cost around $49 (Your Wal-Mart promotion on Black Friday was a good idea--even if it did smack of desperation. I say do it again).

Work with remaining HD-DVD content partners to cut disc prices in half.

Bundle five movies with all players.

/end quote/

Heheh, good one! I'm sure that will work! I mean when they dropped the price to $99 and gave away 10 free movies it worked well didn't it?

HD DVD isn't dead yet, I do think both formats can survive but they will not be overtaken by downloadable content, not for at least 15 years and what's the bet an ever better, cheaper viable format comes out, I don't know? perhaps micro SD cards will explode and start carrying movies and many other formats.

Not to mention other factors retaining to the world, wars etc, I mean who knows what could happen tomorrow, aliens might land and sell us their cheap tech or a plauge might come and then there will be no one to post on blogs.....

http://www.play-asia.com/SOap-23-83-6vmj-71-bm-49-en-84-k-40-extended.html

You serious? If anything i recomend Toshiba throw in the towel now, and cut there losses

Is this a joke? Its insane for Toshiba to continue trying to sell people a player that can only play 30% of movies and Universal and Paramount are almost definitely going to leave as soon as they can which will leave them with no studio support at all.

The best thing they could do is scrap the format immediately and get on board with BluRay like they should have done from the start.

Is this a joke? Its insane for Toshiba to continue trying to sell people a player that can only play 30% of movies and Universal and Paramount are almost definitely going to leave as soon as they can which will leave them with no studio support at all.

The best thing they could do is scrap the format immediately and get on board with BluRay like they should have done from the start.

This picture of mine pretty much sums up the current situation;

http://i2.tinypic.com/6t04mz8.jpg

your thinking in the wrong way they just need to run and ad telling the truth about blu-ray the fact that it's not finished with there profile crap. Average joe doesn't even know about it's simple it costs less for hd dvd players and to date no blu-ray player can do all that hd dvd players can do.

My question for you right now is that who is going to invest in hd-dvd? Who is going to buy hd-dvd even if Toshiba price them at $99, when people believe the hd-dvd format is dead. Nothing in the world is going to make people buy hd-dvd. If Toshiba is smart, they should cut the lost right now and move on, else this hd-dvd thing might bring Toshiba to bankruptcy.

Can you say "Betamax?"

wow did you read the word betmax and just post that? what are you retarded? this is the opposite of betamax: sonys format is dominating market share

HD-DVD = Betamax.... I mean come on Sony was the sole supporter of the format much like Sony was of the Betamax. Whoever thinks Blu-Ray is Betamax is seriously delusional! People call Sony greedy, Toshiba is still hanging on to royalties from DVD, they should jump on the Blu-Ray bandwagon!

Both formats are going to plunge. Consumers are getting smarter. DD (Direct Download) is the future. They will both exist but as storage media. Once they both make cheap burners sales will increase.

owen, are you serious??? do you own a blu-ray player!!! blu-ray can do just as much as a hddvd, and in the future hddvd wont be able to come close to it!!!! what a dumb comment!!!

Digital download will never be a future replace for blu-ray or hd. Download might be worked in renting business, besides this, it would not work anywhere else. Would you buy and download 50gb star war movie even if you can download in less than 30 minutes. What are you going to do with the 50gb file? How convennient of that for you to take that movie to your friend's house or on vacation etc...? I don't see that is working very good. So physical disks will always with us whether we like them or not.

Blu-Ray has created this problem, HD DVD was out first, is a natural progression from DVD making it cheaper and easier to produce but Sony and the rest of the consortium wanted to get their own format out instead of backing HD DVD and making it easier and cheaper for the consumer.

I hope all you people backing Blu-Ray are going to be happy with yourselves knowing you've given HD media an uncertain future and if Blu-Ray wins outright you've cost the constumer a lot of extra cash.

Plus I hope you are not getting worms/virus from internet because that might be the trigger to delete your whole libraries of movies.

What is so great about HD-DVD? I think that your editorial is totally irresponsible, because it only encourages a prolonging of this silly and useless format war. This war, which is driven only by money and huge egos, is playing out at the expense of us users and consumers. I applaud Warner's courageous decison and hope it drives the last nail in the coffin of HD-DVD and the format war.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against HD-DVD; it is a fine format; neverthelless, Blu-ray is technically superior, at least in terms of capacity (per layer). This means more room for the new and better audio CODECs and more special features without restricting the video/audio quality. Also, with Warner, Blu-ray has vastly superior studio support.

I have long been puzzled why PC Magazine and others have kept their heads firmly planted in the sand, and have remained totally oblivous to the statistics published weekly all over the internet, which have sown consistently that HD-DVD has been in big trouble for over a year now. You all have stubbornly reported the format war as neck-and-neck, at best, and have often shown a pro-HD-DVD bias.

I wonder if you have been paid under the table by Toshiba or Microsoft, as were Paramount and DreamWorks.

Again, such journalism is irresponsible. It is the responsibility of any journalist to report to his/her readers accurate, honest and complete information.

Great sarcastic writing Lance.
You almost had me believing that you were serious serious as opposed to tongue in cheek serious.

The reason HDDVD didn't make to the desktop is because the high price of hardware that it takes to be play HD content on Vista. Vista will degrade HD content from any source if you don't have the proper hardware that uses HDCP that protects the copying of media leaving the computer to the monitor. Microsoft killed HDDVD and Sony got lucky, because their reputation of putting root kits on CD's makes me wary of buying anything Sony's makes.

With diminishing studio support, the HD-DVD/Blu Ray battle has finally titled in favor of Blu Ray. I don't know about you but if you are in the market for a next generation disc player why would you buy an HD-DVD one when Blu Ray, especially now with the Warner announcement, has a far more substantial catatlogue of films. Let's face it, the discs that sell because consumers want them are on Blu Ray-one example is Casino Royale. Even Paramount which discontinued Blu Ray support in August 2007 has an exception for its Steven Spielberg films. What does that tell you? It wouldn't surprise me if both Paramount and Universal now defect to exclusive Blu Ray production. Even though Next Generation disc sales are still miniscule compared to DVD sales, would you want to manufacture discs that nobody will buy? The studios will go with whatever format will sell more discs and make more $$.

The above article speaks volumes about this website.

WOW terrible read, desperation at best.

Sony won, get over it already.

Why would I buy HD-DVD instead of Blu-Ray? Easy. Even at $400, Blu-Ray is more than twice as expensive than HD-DVD. I intended to just buy an upconverting DVD player and wait out the format wars, but the HD-DVD unit was hardly more expensive, considering it came with a HDMI cable. Blu-Ray will probably win, and someday I'll probably buy one, but I doubt that standalone Blu-Ray players will ever be as cheap as HD-DVD is now. Were it not for competition from Toshiba, the cheapest Blu-Ray would still be a PS3.

It seems to me like Toshiba has been undermining the HD-DVD player market by dumping the players at a huge loss for them.
No serious manufacturer of HD players would go for HD-DVD as it is now, as trying to compete with Toshiba on price would be a lost cause.

Seriously, who cares? I thought it was pretty retarded for there to be any sort of new disk based media to begin with. Look at what happened to cd's, who the hell still buys cds? I hate hard media, I have so many movies and music that having to track down anything is a pain. I've already gotten rid of all of my cd's and ripped them to mp3's most of My movie collection sits on my hard drive. Granted not everyone has a couple of terrabytes available for storage, but the future isn't downloadable movies, the future is streaming content. Internet connections aren't fast enough to support HD video yet but they soon will be. Sites like vondo.com have the right idea, charge a monthy service to see as many movies as you want. Or you could have a pay per view setup, buy a movie and have the option to store it locally or stream it whenever you want. Hell you might have to wait a couple of minutes to have the movie buffer but it sure beats having to drive to the store or wait for it to arrive in the mail. And for those of you out there saying "Well Stephen not everyone has a high speed internet connection" Well shit... those people probably don't have a HD TV either so again, who cares?

They need to just move HD-DVD to the PC medium,
and use the cheap HD-DVD roms for archival purposes.
I would'nt mind storing all my XviD's on a cheap $5
HD-DVD rom with 25GB of storage. I would never pay
$25 for a blank Blu-Ray disc. And what idiot would still buy movies when you can get them for free from Netflix or the internet?.

HD DVD please just go away! We need one format. Blu Ray is superior technology and will get cheaper over time. Everything is expensive when its new.

HDDVD still have a chance in developing countries where price is important and no region code required.

We all know HDDVD player is going to be even cheaper, while BD is expensive. You can get a dual format player about the same price as BD, when BD makes sense.

Are you serious... if Blu-Ray wins, Sony's GREED will shot SkyHigh again! Remember the 80's when Sony's Betamax was dominant and arrogant, they even have the guts to sue consumers making private copy of home videos. Although Betamax is superior in video quality they were eventually wiped out by Toshiba's VHS because of consumers backlash against Sony's GREED.

I am one of the fortunate (maybe?) few that opted for both formats because I wanted all my movies in HD, although I would prefer a single format so long as I have a player that plays both it is not such a big deal, quite frankly the movie quality is the same for each format. From a tech savvy consumer perspective I would prefer HD-DVD to win, not because of the amount of storage, bit rates, audio codecs etc. but because it is more friendly (don't mistake that with friendly, I only said more friendly) for consumers. It doesn't have region encoding (so you can buy discs whilst abroad and even play US discs in other countries), it is a more durable disc that Blu-ray (my 2 year old already scratched a Blu-ray disc simply by dropping it rendering the reading of one of the chapters impossible, she has dropped an even stood on an HD-DVD disc) and it is easier to rip to hard disk and re-encode/transcode for other devices. I also agree with Kiwi that Sony has always been greedy, locked consumers into proprietary technology and develops ghastly software that no sane user would really want on their PC, I find it difficult to believe they will change their ways on become consumer friendly anytime soon, don't get me wrong Sony does develop some great products but it is more than happy to leave adopters of its technology out in the cold (MiniDisc anyone?).

Blu-ray won. Here's why:

http://miniburb.wordpress.com/2008/01/08/blue-ray-vs-hd-dvd-the-winner-is/

Thank you Hammer...
You know, if you want to play Halo 3, you put it in your Xbox 360. If you want to play MGS4, you load it up on your PS3. You don't complain (too much) because you know that the end result is what you want; you get to play your game. I know that the media war is a little different in that they are both trying to knock the other out, but as long as there is support from different studios to put out movies that I want to see, on whatever format, that is what we have to deal with. No, I do not want to spend the money on multiple drives or dual drives; but if I want to watch movies from different studios, in different HD formats, for now that's what I have to do...

I am no expert by any means and just learning from all your posts. But if what Hammer is saying is true, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why Blu-Ray is going to win. No wonder Warner has opt out of HD-DVD. Maybe your artical should include one more suggestion: "HD-DVD, make things harder to rip"

lance get over the fact you brought a 21st century betamax and go buy a blu ray player

Scott, your wife becoming aware of Blu-ray before HD-DVD could just be incidental. Most non technical people might wonder what a Blu-ray is a new laser toy for Junior???
HD-DVD easily defines what it is High Definition DVD. I also believe that HD-DVD not on could but should win for 2 reasons. one is the regional openness of disc, making it cheaper and easier for distribution purposes and the over all cost of players and Disc. Two, if Sony does get a lock on the market who knows what they will do with there proprietary position in the market, there past performance does not make me feel that they will go easy on the consumer. So far the only superiority of Blu-ray that any one has mentioned to me is the greater capacity. This greater capacity is only needed for some future adjuncts and not the movie content. Most people simple want to watch a movie not dissect it from a million angles etc.., which can be done on HD-DVD if one chooses to do so.

At first I thought that it would be stupid and ignorant for any studio to stop using any medium for selling their media. By not providing the movies for people with HD-DVD, you are losing a customer base and losing sales. From what I have seen, profits on HD and Blu-ray on the retail market are very high.

After reading some of the posts, I realized why a studio should not support HD. One person mentioned they were easier to copy. Studios would prefer you not to copy, even for your own personal use.

The big reason, I suspect, is the fact that the device is regionless. DVD prices and profit margins are different in every country. In Thailand, people can not afford $10 to $30 USD for a movie. They have cheaper ways to get lower quality copies and are generally happy with pirated movies. How do you sell to these people? Lower the prices and put on a region lock. With the region lock you can sell the same discs for $5 USD and make some profit. If something wasn't region locked, what would stop an online Thai store to sell the movies to the US at 80% off?

Early fall 2007

Warner 'Sorry Toshiba, I know we worked together closely on this project but we just got an offer we can't refuse from Sony, we're leaving!'

Toshiba 'We wish you would reconsider, what can we do to change your decision?'

Warner 'Nothing you don't have enough clout. Nothing personal, just business'.

Toshiba 'We just finished a production run of 100,000 players. Please let us sell them'.

Warner 'OK, I guess we owe you that much'

Let's hear it for corporate greed w/ no care for the consumer. Whether Warner went HD DVD or BD only, they probably would have ended the format war and made X million dollars in disc sales in the long run. Sony/BDA just made sure to win the war by buying an undeserved victory, and Warner's bottom line just went from X million dollars to X+500 million dollars...

I've stayed away from both formats not only for the usual reason of not knowing which would win but also because my DLP projector, being a few years old, doesn't have the encrypted connection required by both systems for HD.

I do get HD from my cable box in component video, so I can compare it side-by-side with the 480p that my Faroujda-based Denon puts out: HD may be a little better, but not enough to spend big bucks on - and I'm projecting an image seven feet wide!

In fact, material mastered in HD and downconverted to standard DVD looks like HD on my setup (take another look at your Star Wars DVDs) - remember that lossy compression is used by all disk systems!

It's clear that what's doomed HD is that Blu protects the film industry's economics better, by providing region coding and by being harder to rip. Its thus backwards for the columnist to urge HD to fight for survival by getting burners into PCs - the day that happens, the remaining studios will abandon HD!

I own both a Sony BDP-S300 and a Toshiba HD-A30, comparable players with comparable features (although the Toshiba required a firmware update to be able to output 1080p).

The only thing keeping HD-DVD alive at all is the current strange practice of Universal and Paramount of releasing hi-def content exclusively in HD-DVD. Even this, however, is already seriously compromised by Steven Spielberg's refusal to go with HD-DVD, somewhat mitigating the effects of Universal's decision.

I bought the Toshiba because of Paramount's recent decision and only in light of three other, unrelated factors: 1) It came with a BOATLOAD of free HD-DVD disks (nine of them, which sell at retail for about what the player cost me); 2) I have enough money to, and; 3) Stacking it on top of the Blu-Ray player nicely balances out the appearance of my home entertainment center. I bought it fully realizing that it will soon become a doorstop.

There is one major difference between this format war and the old VHS/Beta war: Where there were strengths and weaknesses working to the advantage/disadvantage of both Beta and VHS (Beta's better picture vs. VHS's longer recording times being the major balancing factor), the winning Blu-Ray format this time is superior in every respect, making the decision so much easier.

Also, I question the sense of producing both standard def and hi-def on the same disk, an "advantage" for HD-DVD that is unlikely ever to become available on Blu-Ray because of the difference in manufacturing. The dual-format disk is priced as a hi-def, significantly higher than standard. Because the content is also released on a regular DVD, people without hi-def players will buy that, and people with hi-def players don't need the standard def, so this makes no sense to me.

Finally! At long last we now know which one to buy. But it is not to buy or watch Hollywood movies, which everyone else seems to assume is the exclusive use. None of us buy movies because cable, sat, and theaters have far more than enough of that, and watching a movie twice is a bore anyway.

Instead we'll use it to put family and personal stuff on, sometimes that I made with Adobe Premiere to get passed around.

I had a feeling that BluRay would eventually take the clear lead and distance themselves as the HD content leader. Looks like I'll be putting my Toshiba A20 up for sale on eBay real soon -- along w/ the HD movies I've collected. Thank goodness I had the foresight to purchase a PS3 at the same time as the 'shiba. So long HD-DVD -- thanks for the memories!

The problem with the average consumer, and virtually every BluRay advocate here (not to mention the author of this post) is that you completely neglect the facts.

Why HD DVD is the superior format:

A.
The HD DVD spec requires
1. TrueHD decoding built-in to the player.
2. An ethernet port for internet connectivity
3. All discs must use either H.264 or VC-1 video codecs.
4. All discs must use either DD, DD+, TrueHD or DTS-HD audio codecs
5. PIP is required for a player
6. Internet enabled functions are required for a player

A1.
As a spec, from day one, HD DVD has the immediate advantage. It has all the features of BD Profile 2.0 built-in and ready to go from the very beginning. As a result, many discs produced for HD DVD already support downloadable content, PIP and many other advanced features.

A2.
To date there is not a single BD Profile 2.0 player on the market.

B.
HD DVD has never had manufacturing problems, while BluRay continues to have issues: http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/Warner/Technical_Glitches/Blade_Runner_Blu-ray_Suffers_Manufacturing_Glitch/1290

C.
HD DVD players are less than half the cost of any BluRay player.

D.
Every professional reviewer who has looked at movies in both BluRay and HD DVD formats continue to agree that the HD DVD quality is better.

So you want to battle? Look at the facts. Does BluRay have bigger disc capacity? Yes... but thats meaningless when both formats can fully support having the same 1080p content. HD DVD is a mature format. BluRay is still going through lots of growing pains. What happens to all the BD Profile 1.0/1.1 players people bought when BD Profile 2.0 starts to take over? What happens when the BD discs people buy no longer work? The customer is screwed. Why pay Sony a huge royalty for a lesser technology just so you can have bigger disc capacity? That makes no sense.

Urging HD-DVD to "hang in there" is really irresponsible... not to suggest this article has any real impact, but seriously.

I'm a bigtime HD-head, and still haven't picked a side. I'm on my second-generation HDTV set (71" Samsung DLP), I have HD satellite TV, an older red-laser HD capable DVD player, two HDV camcorders, dual HDMI/HDCP HD monitors on my PC, etc. But regardless of being a typical early adopter for nearly any tech thing, I refused to get into a format war.

You could certainly argue for either format based on the technology, and really, the differences don't matter that much. Sure, the extra capacity of Blu-Ray is nice, but more useful for computer archival than making any profound difference on video discs. For this market to really go anywhere, though, it's important for one format to win. Period.

The cost of the player is a non-issue, in the long run. You're paying $25 or so per disc for software, whether it's one month or one year before you have spent more on software than your player, you will, if you're actually using HD (admittedly, this will be much harder now with only two studios on HD-DVD). If the war lasts long enough, every player goes dual format and the CE folks probably don't look back. But if this really leads to a win for Blu-Ray, you'll see HD-DVD go the way of Betamax, and when the laser on your current player dies (in as little as 3-5 years), good luck hosting that software collection on some other player. That's why there needs to be a single format.

The writing on the wall was already leading to Blu-Ray, which is why Microsoft spent all that cash to get Paramount doing HD-DVD only. When you look at CE companies, it's very much Toshiba vs. "everyone else in the world"... they're Apple to Sony's IBM, only not as cool or as mean. The new leading consumer video format is DVD-R for camcorders, which stink... but a high-def format can fit reasonable amounts of video on a 8cm disc. Only problem... every company in the DVD-R camcorder business is a Blu-Ray supporter, if they made a choice. Sony owns about 80% of that market.

Look at the media around... most DVD-R/RW resellers offer one sort of HD-DVD-R disc, and several brands of BD-R, BD-R inkjet printables, dual layer, etc. Whatever the market force, this is another datapoint currently in favor of Blu-Ray (the blanks are also lower in cost-per-bit).

And for that guy with the projector who can't see much difference between DVD and high-def... dude, fix your system or get your eyes checked. While sure, there are some decent DVD prints, and some material isn't inherently high frequency, the difference is day and night for most content, at least on my 71" DLP rear projection system. Even the stuff I shoot myself, encoded to WMV/HD at DVD-like bitrates, is a dramatic improvement over SD stuff (DVCAM, DVD, etc).

Digital Download is the way of the future, but distante future, there are many infrastructure and storing problems to overcome first.
You have to be able to download the moving in less than 30 min, no one wants to way 2 hours to see a movie. The internet connection must cost around 30 dollars per month (but much faster). The server must be able to handle multiple poeple downloading the movies at the same time, and finally, you need A couple of Terrabyte HD for less than 300 dollars and 100GB SD cards (or what ever cards) that can hold a coule of movies when you go in vacation & for backup. Once all this exists or is getting close of existing at a reasonable price, you will see DD take over Blu Ray or whatever media that will exist then. Until then, Blu Ray has a 5 to 10 good years ahead of them. Streaming is already there, but that will only kill block buster, not blu ray.

HD-DVD is a good format if only because the format standard is finished, and developers are adhering to it. BluRay can't say that - the discs are all over the place with what they contain. Also, HD-DVD has built-in compatibility with existing SD DVD. Advantage: HD-DVD.

However, if HD-DVD is to do anything, they need to get a RECORDER into the market that can compete squarely price-for-price with a standard-def DVD recorder. That means a recorder with an ATSC/NTSC tuner that can record HD and SD DVD on discs for $250. The way I see it, Blu Ray isn't the competition, SD DVD is. Get a replacement for these into homes; now that's something, it furture-proofs people looking at the HD switch in 2009 but wanting something to work now.

If you do this, you'll beat BluRay.

True friends don't let friends touch anything sony....

Flash drive ..__________ (insert your type here, it all cheap) is the ideal media. Why do I "have" to have any player at all? Insert memory stick, watch HD content on my lcd/plasma/oled (sorry rear projections are going to the way side) and voila...instant HD. Or......

Insert said media into my AV reviever and let it do all the processing and send it via hdmi to above mentioned set. Honestly, i'm sick of having so much electronic crap any more.... this format, that format, this kinda player that kinda player, or a multiplayer..eeesssh. Compact/flash drives are smaller and easier to carry and share with family and friends if vacationing and so forth.

Ehhhh, nuff of my useless thoughts...just wish somehow sony would disappear.... :P

LOL. That's a good one. I almost believed (just for a split second) this was a serious article. Good one! hahahaha

The author of this article implies that HD-DVD has done something wrong and needs to improve in some fashion. The HD-DVD consortium defined the technical standards and manufacturers delived them out of the gate. Blu-ray will require folks to reinvest in new players in order to obtain what is already available in HD-DVD. 7.1 audio is a luxury for most folks and isn't really a factor in this war since it is present in the high end HD-DVD players.

HD-DVD hardware is less expensive than its Blu-ray competitors. Hybrid HD-DVD discs were manufactured to help consumers make the transition and no one was forced into buying them. Non-hybrid HD-DVD titles also exist.

Others say that HD-DVD is easier to copy. All HD discs currently using encryption use the same AACS technology which has not been broken, but effectively bypassed. Also, since Blu-ray burners are easy to come by, I would think that favors HD-DVD in terms of less pirating. How does anyone loose money if someone rips a movie to a hard drive to watch on a HTPC? They won't.

HD-DVD required little re-tooling of existing DVD presses. Blu-ray is costlier, thus costing the consumer more in the end.

Sony has two movie studios that are contributing the outcome. How can this be fair? Wish I was a lawyer.

Why would consumers want to support proprietary formats and root kits? If HD-DVD wasn't using H.264 and VC-1 codecs, Blu-ray would probably still be releasing their HD titles in MPEG2 format.

My vote will always be with a consumer friendlier format such as HD-DVD. IMHO, HD-DVD's only downfall was in the lack of burners during 07'.

I would imagine that some country outside the U.S. will copy Blu-ray titles to HD-DVD format since the studio's are not giving consumers a choice thus providing a way to purchase the content.

Regardless of the outcome, my HD-A20 will still provide better upscalling of SD DVD over the cheaper units being marketed. Anyone with a considerable collection of DVD's knows where I'm coming from.

I have no regrets with my decision to support HD-DVD.

Seriously? Let one format win, for crying out loud - whichever it may be. VHS wasn't the ideal, Betamax was - but VHS still won and we got over that hurdle. Time to get over the HD-DVD/BlueRay hurdle, one way or another. BlueRay's on a roll, let it roll.

Nice to see the Blu ray fan boys coming out of the closet. Time will tell. I seem to remember the same idiots touting + R and -R, and the Ram kids saying it was the wave of the future. Guess what, they're all still here, so chuck out your Kool-aid and wait to see what the landscape looks like in a year.Then you can go back into your closet for another 5 years while you hem dresses.

I personally hope that HD-DVD keeps up the fight. It's a better format (1. cheaper 2. set standard). It's better for consumers and studios if it wins. HD-DVD players will be able to be sold for less than $100 allowing the masses to get into it sooner. That would mean it would be a shorter time that studios would have to produce both HD and DVD. The discs are cheaper to make which means a higher profit margin per disc. And consumers wouldn't have to deal with players that can't do everything that the more modern players can. WB made the lame mistake of making the vast majority of their HD-DVDs dual format and charging $10 more. I know it did not cost them $10 more to make the disc. So whenever I was presented with a choice of a WB HD-DVD or another HD-DVD, I usually chose the cheaper one. Combo discs are cool, but not worth the cost of the HD-DVD and the DVD.

And I love how everyone is acting like, at this moment, HD-DVD is dead. Nothing could be further from the truth. WB is still supporting HD-DVD until like May or June. It looks like I'll still be able to get I Am Legend on HD-DVD. Secondly, the average Joe is completely clueless to this whole thing. They still see two kinds of discs. They still see players costing hundreds of dollars. They're still going to sit on the bench and wait. The HD-DVD camp needs to do two things to get this battle back: 1. drop the price of their lowest player to around $100 (I guess they've already dropped it to $150). 2. Run an ad campaign about how BD is still not a finalized standard. There's a reason most political ads in America are attack ads. It's because they work. I'd personally wish they wouldn't do this. But I think it's important to their survival. One tactic HD-DVD should employ is to drag this format war out. As their cheaper players get cheaper, more people will buy into their format and they'll start to gain market share. Even as dual format players get cheaper, it'll be more appealing to studios to put out HD-DVDs since they are cheaper to produce. Price is how HD-DVD will win this. They need to play that card more.

Someone tell me: Why on earth has the HD-DVD camp not ifused the market with cost-effective burners by Christmas 2007?

Anybody have any idea why?
Peter

I think consumers are best served by an end to the format war - regardless of which format wins. Now that Warner Home Video has pretty much decided that, let's move on.

With only one HD format to support, all manufacturers can concentrate on increasing the quality and lowering the cost of players and burners. That's the competition consumers need.

Having said that, condider this: While the storage requirements for HD movies remain constant, the storage capability of flash media is rapidly increasing. How long will it be before HD movies can be economically marketed on flash cards? When that time comes, which IMHO will be sooner rather than later, which would you rather buy: a mechanical drive with difficult-to-write media, or the simple little card readers we already have today?

Please don't try to give HD-DVD an artificial breath of life. Its death is excellent news for consumers - they don't really care who wins this battle, but insist on having one universal standard. Now finally HD products can take off.

We who have HD DVD players need to persuade the independant film companies like BBC,CH4 and canal + and many more around the world to continue to support HD DVD. Lets face it, there are millions of HD owners who will continue to buy the discs for as long as they are available. There are potentially thousands of titles that shoud be made available. Dont take this lying down.

Bill Quinn
Glastonbury
UK