Time Warner Inc's Warner Bros Entertainment will stop selling DVDs made with Toshiba Corp's high-definition (HD) technology, bolstering Sony Corp's Blu-ray in the battle to become the next home entertainment standard.
Warner Bros had been releasing movies in both formats. It will drop Toshiba's HD DVD format at the end of May, the studio said yesterday in an e-mailed statement.
The decision benefits Tokyo-based Sony, which built Blu-ray into its PlayStation 3 video-game console to stoke demand from consumers who don't want to buy a separate HD DVD player.
A coalescing of major studios around one format would help them to fight a flattening in DVD sales at a time when movie production has been hampered by a two-month old writers strike in Hollywood.
"We expect HD DVD to `die' a quick death," Rich Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Capital in New York, wrote on his blog yesterday.
"While we still expect overall consumer spending on DVDs to decline at least 3 percent in 2008, the risk of an even worse 2008 DVD environment has most likely been avoided by Warner's early 2008 decision," he said.
Greenfield has a "neutral" rating on New York-based Time Warner and doesn't own any of the shares, which fell US$0.42, or 2.6 percent, to US$15.91 at 4:01pm in New York Stock Exchange composite trading and have lost 29 percent in the past year.
Toshiba is "surprised" by the decision to abandon HD DVD, given Warner Bros' level of participation in developing the standard, the Tokyo-based company said in a statement.
"We will assess the potential impact of this announcement with the other HD DVD partner companies and evaluate potential next steps," Toshiba said.
The battle between the two technologies has left studios scrambling to predict which format might prevail.
Warner Bros, the second-largest studio in last year's US box-office receipts, joins Walt DisnVey Co and News Corp's Fox in backing Blu-ray exclusively. The top studio, Viacom Inc's Paramount Pictures, uses HD DVD, along with DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc and General Electric Co's Universal Pictures.
Movie discs using Blu-ray's high-definition format outsold HD DVD by 2-to-1 in the first half of last year, according to Home Media Research.
Warner's move "will further the potential for mass-market success and ultimately benefit retailers, producers, and most importantly, consumers," chief executive officer Barry Meyer said in the statement.
Viacom, based in New York, and DreamWorks in Glendale, California, announced in August they would back the HD DVD format.
At the time, Greenfield wrote on his blog that Viacom will receive US$50 million and DreamWorks Animation will get US$100 million from a group including Toshiba. He didn't name his sources.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”