Toshiba do a Black Knight as HD DVD Sales Plunge

After Warner Brothers recent announcement that it was switching to Blue Ray, another death knell was heard pealing for the HD DVD player. Prior to Warner's move the hardware market sales were split roughly 50/50. Sales figures after the sale (week ending 12th January 2008) were 90/10 in favor of the blue boy. Like Monty Python's Black Knight, Toshiba are insisting that the fights not over yet and that the disparity was down to their removal of a Christmas discount and the bundling of Blue Ray players with some flat panel TV's by certain awfully nice manufacturers.

In a move to fight back, Toshiba swung a mighty kick at their foe by cutting the price of their players. To paraphrase King Arthur in Holy Grail, "Look, you stupid bastards. You've got no arms left!"

On the blue ray front, news that a lot of existing players wont be able to play disks coming out next year that have features included in the BD Video Final Standard Profile 1.1. With profile 1.1 persistent memory is mandatory which is a problem if your player doesn't have in-built flash memory. Furthermore the Profile 2.0 (aka BD Live) spec makes internet connectivity mandatory, which is a bummer if you haven't got internet connectivity.

That's going to leave a lot of irate early adopters who splashed out a grand on a player only to find that it can't play all forthcoming releases. If they annoy enough of them, then the blue format could yet be killed off by the manufacturers stupidity. HD DVD players had both persistent memory and internet connectivity inbuilt from the start, which made them a damn site more future proofed than their blue rivals. A year or so down the line we could see lawsuits taken out against blue ray manufacturers for selling machines which won't play all disks.

My advice is to avoid buying a dedicated Blue Ray player until the manufacturers get their act together and buy a PS3 instead. It's a damn fine player, can be upgraded to profile 1.1 and the presence of an ethernet port means that in all likelihood it will be possible to upgrade it to profile 2.0 when the time comes.

Two new on-line petitions have been setup to allow you to give your opinion on the future of HD DVD. The first requests that the studios save the format, and asks Warner's to reconsider their decision to jetison it. The second asks the same studios to put HD DVD out of its misery and let the format die. With the volume of people involved neither are likely to affect the film industries decision either way, but hey it' feels good to be able to give a thumbs up or down either way.