Man, you just gotta hand it to Toshiba. As mentioned in my earlier post, Toshiba had stated that they would not producing Blu-ray players. Instead, they would focus on other avenues of bringing HD content to our homes, through technologies related to PCs, HDTVs, and, uh, DVDs. Oh yes, now we remember, HD on DVD.
The subject has recently resurfaced again, this time with some notion of a timeline (six months). Of course, with the lack of any details of the technology whatsoever and the fact that this comes from unnammed sources, we are required to liberal with the salt.
Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that Toshiba has ingested some form of stupid pills. Where technological advancement is concerned, I've learned to never say never, and we have to be fair to Toshiba; they may succeed.
So, rather than discuss the impossibility of the idea, I think it's more relevant to ask why. Why wasn't this new technology unveiled earlier? If they had come forward with this, say, eight or nine months ago, they would have blown Blu-ray and its supporters clear out of the water. A DVD format that offers much higher resolution, lower prices, and backward compatibility? It's a dream come through, really.
But strangely, around that time they were supposedly offering money (in the neighborhood of $150 million) to Paramount and Dreamworks to go HD DVD exclusive, a sum which they allegedly never did manage to pay up, mostly due to the fact that their price slashing probably hurt them beyond repair. By the time Toshiba threw in the towel in the format war, it recorded a 108.5 billion yen loss in the January–March quarter. You can bet it's not just their wallet that's hurting.
Back to the new "enhanced" DVD technology. Let's assume they somehow deliver on their promise of greater quality (both picture and sound) on DVD, and the enhanced players are cheaper than BD players (we don't know by how much, though). So what? Another format war, another price war, another circus of corporate spin, another time of uncertainty and frustration for people who just wanna go the store, pick up a movie, pick up a player, go home, plug it in, and voila. Plug and play is just as important in home entertainment as it is in computing. Instead, Toshiba's "enhanced" DVD technology promises more plug than play, and everyone—Toshiba, Sony, the studios, the consumers; EVERYONE—gets burned.
To make a realistic prediction, six months later Toshiba delivers a technology that does improve DVD quality, but not so much as to attain HD quality. The prices of the new enhanced players will be more expensive than conventional DVD players, and only marginally less than BD players (given the current BD players price trend). In short, Toshiba produces an intermediate format that's better than DVD but not as good as HD. This move will probably upset the market once more, and Toshiba may very possibly dig itself deeper into the ground. Whether Blu-ray survives this second (and probably final) onslaught will be decided by what its supporters do (e.g., BD players at $200 or less, steady stream of content from the studios, more marketing and educational efforts from the BDA) from now till the end of the year.
Nah, not stupid pills; more like stupid pride.
The Brooklyn Heist
1 hour ago
