HD-DVD finally Dead ?

Earlier in the year I mentioned that Warner Bros. studio changed their stance from supporting both High-Def DVD formats to just supporting Blu-ray. Since that announcement 6 weeks ago, the tides have changed drastically for Blu-ray. Many smaller independent studios around the world have changed to Blu-ray only.

Last week was a St. Valentine’s massacre for HD-DVD. In the United States, retail stores Best-Buy and Wal-Mart have decided to support Blu-ray and Netflix the #1 DVD online renter has decided to stop supporting HD-DVD and only support Blu-ray.

On Saturday and Sunday reports were coming out of Japan that Toshiba would cease production of HD-DVD hardware and close a factory in northern Japan. This is not official, but all major media outlets around the world are reporting on this and signalling the end of the Format war. Now it’s just waiting for Toshiba to publicly announce it.

The next hurdles Blu-ray faces is get people to upgrade their DVD player to a Blu-ray player to watch High-Definition movies on their Rear-Projection, LCD and Plasma televisions and projectors. Competing against Blu-ray are high-def download services from Apple TV, Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3 and cable/satellite subscribers with On-demand and Pay-per view access. But all of the above pales in comparison to the quality of Blu-ray picture and its uncompressed audio codec’s.

Over the course of the next year, the Blu-ray Disc Association needs to reduce prices on hardware and software. As well as market the benefits it offers over DVD. And bring to market full specification players, that do Picture-in-Picture functionally and Internet connectivity. The future looks bright for Blu-ray for 2009 and onwards. Hello to 1080P High-Definition video.