ENGAGING CULTURE

Toshiba announced today that it will cease development, production and marketing of its HD-DVD players and recorders. They had been struggling from the start to compete with Sony’s Blu-Ray in sales.

Early this year, they were dealt one of a series of deathblows by Warner Bros. who said that they would abandon HD-DVD and would release all new and cataloged films in Blu-Ray format, leaving HD-DVD with only two major studios in their corner. To battle this, Toshiba cut the price of their players by nearly half and took out a 30 second commercial during the super bowl at a cost of 2.7 million dollars. But despite their best efforts, 93% of the high definition players sold since Warner Bros. announcement have been Blu-Ray.

Then earlier this week, the dominoes began to quickly fall. Netflix announced that it would limit its high def. offerings to Blu-Ray discs, and Best Buy committed to focus on the sale of Blu-Ray players and software over the HD-DVD format. But the final nail in the coffin came from a giant (no Oprah didn’t say Blu-ray was one of her favorite things), Wal-Mart announced it would no longer carry HD-DVD software. And as one analyst said, that decision “impossible to bounce back from.”

So now HD-DVD players, while Toshiba will still provide support, will go the way of the BetaMax, the 8-track, and the ZIP drive, functional yet purposeless, discarded technology. Congratulations Blu-Ray, may this new open playing field create a market ripe for lower-cost standalone players that the average movie watcher can afford. Hurray for capitalism!