HD DVD, the beloved format of Toshiba and three Hollywood studios, died on Friday after a brief illness. The cause of death was determined to be the decision by Wal-Mart to stock only high-definition DVDs and players using the Blu-ray format.
There are no funeral plans, but retailers and industry analysts are already writing the obituary for HD DVD.
The announcement by Wal-Mart Stores, the nation's largest retailer of DVDs, that it would stop selling the discs and machines in June when supplies are depleted comes after decisions this week by Best Buy, the largest electronics retailer, to promote Blu-ray as its preferred format, and Netflix, the DVD-rental service, to stock only Blu-ray movies, phasing out HD DVD by the end of this year.
Last year, Target, one of the top sellers of electronics, discontinued selling HD DVD players in its stores but continued to sell them online.
"The fat lady has sung," said Rob Enderle, a technology industry analyst in Silicon Valley. "Wal-Mart is the biggest player in the DVD market. If it says HD DVD is done, you can take that as a fact."
Toshiba executives did not return calls asking for comment. Analysts do not expect the company to take the product off the market but the format war is over. Toshiba had been fighting for more than two years to establish the dominance of the format it developed over Blu-ray, developed by Sony.
The combined weight of the decisions this week, but particularly the heft of Wal-Mart, signals the end of a format war that has confounded and frustrated consumers and that had grown increasingly costly for the consumer electronics industry -- from hardware makers and studios to retailers.
Andy Parsons, a spokesman for the Blu-ray Disc Association, an industry trade group, said retailers and movie studios had incentives to resolve the issue quickly because it was costly for them to devote shelf space and technology to two formats.
Besides, he said, many consumers have sat on the sidelines and not purchased either version because they did not want to invest in a technology that could become obsolete.
Thus far, consumers have purchased about 1 million Blu-ray players, though there are another 3 million in the market that are integrated into the PlayStation 3 consoles of Sony, said Richard Doherty, research director of Envisioneering, a technology assessment firm. About 1 million HD DVD players were sold.
Evenly matched by Blu-ray through last year, HD DVD experienced a marked reversal in fortune early last month when Warner Brothers studio, a unit of Time Warner, announced it would manufacture and distribute movies only in Blu-ray. Warner's decision gave the Blu-ray coalition around 75 percent of the high-definition content from the major movie and TV studios. The coalition includes Sharp, Panasonic and Philips, as well as Walt Disney and 20th Century Fox studios.
Universal, Paramount and the DreamWorks Animation studios still back HD DVD; none of those studios responded to requests for comment on Friday.
"It's pretty clear that retailers consumers trust the most have concluded that the format war is all but over," Parsons said. "Toshiba fought a very good battle, but the industry is ready to move on and go with a single format."
Because movie and entertainment technology has become integrated into a range of consumer electronics, the high-definition movie format war has created unusually wide-ranging alliances. The battle included, for example, video game companies; Microsoft has backed the HD DVD standard and sold a compatible player to accompany its Xbox 360 video game console.
Sony pushed vigorously for the Blu-ray standard, not just because it is a patent holder of the technology, but also because it has integrated the standard into PlayStation 3.
Sony has argued that consumers will gravitate to the PlayStation 3 because of the high-definition movie player.
Any celebration over the victory may be tempered by concerns that the DVD, of any format, may be doomed by electronic delivery of movies over the Internet.
The longer HD DVD battled Blu-ray, the more the market has had an opportunity to gravitate to downloading movies. Such a move, coupled with the growth of technology that makes downloading easier, has threatened to cut into the sales of DVD movies.
But Doherty, like Parsons, argued that downloads are not yet affecting the DVD market and would not do so for some time.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last