Topic: Forget HD DVD: Toshiba focuses on plain old DVD ....

[Fedman NCC-3758]

Forget HD DVD: Toshiba focuses on plain old DVD

By PETER SVENSSON

NEW YORK (AP) - After losing out in the battle to define the high-definition successor of the DVD, Toshiba Corp. has turned its attention to the next best thing: the DVD.

On Monday, the Japanese electronics company is releasing a new DVD player that it says does more than previous models to improve the look of DVDs on high-definition TVs.

The XD-E500 will sell for a suggested price of $149.99, twice as much as regular "upconverting" players, which also improve the look of a DVD, but it is less than half the price of a Blu-ray player.

The Blu-ray disc, championed by Sony Corp. (SNE), early this year beat out Toshiba's HD DVD to become the dominant format for high-definition discs. Toshiba has stopped making HD DVD players.

In a demonstration to reporters last week, Toshiba played the same disc in an XDE player and a standard, $70 upscaling model on side-by-side LCD HDTVs. The new player produced a subtle but noticeable sharpening of the image.

Toshiba didn't demonstrate the XDE against a Blu-ray or HD DVD player, and Louis Masses, director of product planning for the audio and video group at Toshiba America Consumer Products, was careful to stress that it's not meant to compete with or replace Blu-ray.

"If you want Blu-ray, go get Blu-ray. This product is meant to improve playback of DVDs," Masses said.

Masses said the XDE technology, for eXtended Detail Enhancement, will be used in other players, and the brand will be promoted extensively in advertising, including on NBC's Olympics site.

Blu-ray players have six times the image detail of a DVD, and upscaling players, even those using XDE technology, can't overcome that. But they can sharpen edges to overcome the blurriness of a DVD when displayed on a large screen.

Three years after their launch, Blu-ray players are popular with home-theater aficionados but have not caught on in the mainstream, except through Sony's PlayStation 3 game console, which can play Blu-ray discs.

In emphasizing DVDs, Toshiba is playing up to a difficulty for Blu-ray marketers: Most U.S. consumers are happy with DVDs, according to a recent study by ABI Research, and don't believe Blu-ray provides as big of a quality jump as DVDs did over VHS tapes.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080818/D92KFHTO3.html

[Javora]

Looks to me like another losing tactic for Toshiba.  Old DVD disks are going to be fazed out of production by the movie companies at some point in time.  These movie companies like the new protection schemes Blu-ray offers and will try to push old DVD out the door as soon as they can.  My friend and I were talking about this a couple of days ago and we figure that DVD disks have about two years before production stops completely.  If Toshiba thinks that window of opportunity is open wide enough to make a profit off this technology then IMHO the people running Toshiba is delusional.  Good luck Toshiba, let me know how it works out for you...   

[Dash Jones]

Movie companies have tried things like this before, and almost always fail, such as with the contender with DVD, or even with Laser Disc.  The reason DVD seems to have taken off was due to computers and how many started integrating them and using them.  What further helped was that the public eventually accepted the DVD.

If the public doesn't buy something, you can't force them to support it.  Sony is in the Blu-Ray war for another 8 to 9 years.  They pushed hard with their PS3, NOT to be a great console, in fact they purposely lost that war in order to try to get a chunk of something larger and to win the HD-DVD/Blu-ray war.

They won the Blu-Ray, but that was primarily due to the PS3 marketing scheme (as I noted in the business sections of Dyna).  Whether Blu-Ray takes off or not deals directly with whether people see that it has more to offer them then what they currently have (which they aren't seeing), AND to make it more accessible to the general public.

Right now, that isn't happening.  There IS a BIG push, but it's costing more to promote Blu-Ray than to bring in the profit, and profit will eventually either speak...or bankrupt SONY.  SONY is betting on it, big time (because they get a chunk of change from every Blu-Ray sold or made eventually), but that's no guarantee yet.

Right now SONY is losing BILLIONS in the gamble.  I wouldn't be too sure of Blu-Ray taking off yet.

What I WOULD do if I owned Blu-Ray is a different approach to make people want to get Blu-Ray.  This is NOT something that movie studios would want to do at first (just like with Laser Disc, and then early DVDs, the companies didn't WANT extras there, or more accessible scene selections, but when they saw that would push the format...that's what changed to enamor some of the general public, as well as the space required for storage).

These issues can be addressed by TV series.  Yep, I said TV series.  Make the TV series for cheap by putting an entire season on a Blu-Ray and sell it for $20.  Just imagine, if you could have all of Star Trek on 35 Discs (one disk for every season of ST including the animated series).  Each disc had an entire season's worth of episodes.

It's stuff like that, and thinking like that which will make people jump, the same reasons they switched to DVDs.  There's more content (and using the bigger storage for more), easier to keep (one disc as opposed to 5, 6, or 7 discs), and lower costs for all the content.

As demonstrated with Laser Discs, the smaller disc that was competing with DVD, and other formats, most people could care less about sharper quality, or better image, they want more bang for their buck.