Live from Toshiba's HD DVD press conference in Tokyo
By Ryan Block 
posted February 19th 2008 2:46AM
posted February 19th 2008 2:46AM
IT'S OVER! The release just hit the wires even before Toshiba started talking. "Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD DVD Businesses."
5:00PM - Right on time, Toshiba's president, Nishida-san, takes the podium. He is talking about how great and advanced HD DVD was. WAS. He is also speaking about how Toshiba shared a good partnership with Warner. "There was a difficult decision. Multiple standards have a huge impact on consumers."
5:15 - Now he's just reading from the release, more or less. They're on to bigger and better things: two new NAND factories in Japan, one will be jointly-operated with SanDisk.
5:21 - Q&A time!
Three part Q: what was the cause of HD DVD's failure? What is Toshiba doing with its Aomori HD DVD factory? And what about the timing of the announcement?
A: From an objective, fair point of view, we were clearly in a good place until last December and January. So we were very, very surprised by Warner's announcement. As for the Aomori factory, nothing is final at this moment.
Q: Any plans to adopt Blu-ray?
A: No plans at all, not at this moment.
More after the break.
A: We don't have any plans to announce at this time.
Q: Is there any risk of a class action lawsuit against Toshiba for the format war?
A: [For early adopters] there will be always be a risk in buying, that is how it works in the US. We are just hardware maker, so our legal risk is relatively low, we believe.
Q: What is the next-gen NAND flash memory you'll be producing? What does that mean, exactly?
A: 3D NAND is a possible candidate, but just one of them. To avoid any confusion, we cannot say which next-gen memory technology Toshiba will choose to pursue. Nothing is final.
Nishida-san's now answering why the construction will take such long time on the new factory, explaining about how its construction will make it virtually earthquake-proof.
Q: How about the process size of new factory? Is that 32nm?
A: I can't answer that. [laughs]
Q: How many HD DVD players and recorders, exactly, did you sell?
A: 600,000 players in the US and 300,000 Xbox 360 HD DVD drives. 100,000 units were sold in Europe. And about 10,000 players and 20,000 recorders in Japan. So about 1,030,000 units worldwide.
With regard to future media availability, should disc companies will cease production (oh they will!) Toshiba will buy enough discs for current Japanese HD DVD recorder users and resell them online. Now Nishida is talking about how upconverted DVD still looks great.
Because you already did!
It's dead, Jim! Dead!
I would love to say it's about time, but other companies (cough Sony cough cough) took 3 years to give up on Betamax... I mean their own formats... even after the market(consumer) had shown them to be the losers.
So I am surprised not that Blu-Ray won, but that HD-DVD gave up so gracefully and quickly. Toshiba I applaud your sensibilities to let the dead dog lie.
Bravo.
this is great now they can compete (and beat) with samsung in the flash drive and ram industry.
so basically 5pm 19th Feb,2008 can be considered the last moments of HD-DVD
R.I.P my friend.
You and RRoD were the best friends I had for 1 year :)
What the... I play Portal for an hour and a half and I come back to a changed world.. HA!
Do they get their money back from the superbowl commercial?
Okay, so HD-DVD has gone, but the war to make Bluray a viable mainstream product is far from over.
Why are players still over priced? Why are discs still over priced? Why is BD+ DRM so damn nasty and intrusive? Why am I forced to buy a games console to enjoy the best of this format? - If I do, then constant firmware updates will dictate to me what I can and cant watch. My existing DVD collection varies from region 1 and 2.. Bluray will not allow me to watch multi region movies. What about early releases from the USA (im based in the UK), what about the many foreign films I love to import from the far east?
I have thus far resisted both HD DVD and Bluray, but regardless of the fact that we only have one format now, I have grave concerns over the value to consumers and the control Sony have. They are a very very arrogant and greedy corporation. This market is theirs to f**k up now (Read PS3).
HD DVD was the better format. It was working perfectly fine right now, no need to wait for certain version numbers, no need to wait until they finish making the player before you put one under your TV in the den. And it was region free, the DVD Forum broke the trend of locking out certain regions so if the war went to HD DVD we could have imported our favourite animes, Australians could watch American independent films, those from the UK could have gone on holiday to anywhere in the world and picked up a HD DVD as a souvenir to watch with their friends back at home. But with Blu Rays region locking we now have movies that wont play on every single Blu Ray player in the world, or even every single Blu Ray player that doesn't have the right version number.
I know the old saying about bringing Nazi Germany into a discussion, but I think that if we bring those parallels into this format war then the Nazis did win. The Allies lost today and we will have to live under Blu Rays regime.
Has anybody received their 5 free movies yet? I sent away for mine in early December. Do you think they will make good on sending these out? or will there have to be a class action suit on this subject?
--Paul
A sad moment. I was hoping for this ever since I heard of this blue laser technology, many years ago. When I found out there was lower capacity red laser competition, I naturally wanted Blu-Ray to win. But, such a big business HDDVD was. Seeing the photo of the man at the podium kind of makes me sad. I know how horrible it is to put everything you have into something for a long time, only to have it fail. There were so many hard working people dedicated to making this happen. Still, as long as no one died, it's ok. It's a big business loss, but things will move on. Glad Toshiba was able to announce exciting new things in other divisions. Thanks to everyone involved with red HD. May you get good jobs working with blue, and beyond.
65 years ago hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Americans were killing each other, if this is the worse world war we have today, it's not that bad.
Tell me when we can rip and play back any Blu-ray movie in Linux and that is when I will pick up a internal PC drive and not care who won.
Neither HD DVD or Bluray have won yet they still havent gone mainstream.
when bluray beats DVD it will win.
People are not going to pay 200 plus for a bluray player when they can get a dvd player for 30 dollars and a dvd for 10 give or take a few dollars.
Im talking about common people not tech nerds and geeks bluray still has a long way to go, think about when did dvd start going mainstream when you could buy a player for under 200and every went to it when the players dropped to 50.
The war is far from over, first it was 2 against 1 bluray & hddvd against dvd now its bluray against dvd and bluray still has to win that; and price will be the determining factor.
Oh the humanity!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxGejqxN2WY
Can I mail my HD-DVD 360 somewhere and get a discount on BR Sony? C'mon!~
Well Since HD DVD's Upscale DVD better than the Blu Ray, the rest of the HD players on the market will replace them bullcrap upscaler DVD players. I hated those from the beggining.....
Fall on your sword, Nashida-san, you have disgraced yourself.
I guess the hd-dvd built in for 360 rumour is out of the picture.
Any educated person will see that Blu-Ray is merely a money making
opportunity before broadband connections are fast enough to download
HD films.
You download music and not before long you'll download films.
Get over Blu-Ray. It's old news.
The best thing Toshiba can do to continue to fight Bluray is to work aggressively with providers of digital distribution on devices that eliminate optical drive needs.
I have supported HD DVD from the beginning, i have 2 stand alone players and an xbox 360 add on player... sony can die a horrible death, i will never buy a blu ray product of any kind.. what a joke.