This article was written on March 13, 2008 by CyberNet.
Toshiba has had a rough year as they’ve watched HD DVD rather quickly fall to the bottom and eventually get discontinued. February 9th was the day that they made the official announcement that they were going to stop development, manufacturing, and marketing of HD DVD players and recorders. It’s been about a month and now we’re learning what kind of loss HD DVD actually was for Toshiba, and it’s huge.
There are not that many things in this world that there are a billion of. Offhand I can think of the fact that there are several billion people in the World and there are probably billions of blades of grass or granules of sand, but a billion of something is a huge number. It’s almost impossible to imagine a billion of anything, especially money. A billion dollars is a number that Toshiba will have stuck in their minds for quite a while because that’s how much they lost on HD DVD. They took a risk, and as it turns out, the risk wasn’t worth it and Blu-ray won the format war.
Speaking of Blu-ray, now that they don’t have any competition, prices of the players are going up. Here most of us were just wanting the “format-war” to end yet it was the competition that was helping to keep prices in check. Here’s what I mean:
- The Samsung BD-P1400 player was selling for $318 on January 1st. It is now selling at $374 (an increase of $56).
- The Sony BDP-S300 was selling at $307 on January first and is now selling at $403 (an increase of $96).
- The Sharp BD-HP20U was selling at $386 on January 1st and is now selling at $440 (an increase of $54).
- Panasonic has their DMP-BD30K player which was selling at $401 on January 1st but is now selling at $480 (an increase of $79).
One example of a player that hasn’t gone up is the LG BH200 which was selling at $999 on January 1st but is now selling at $666. The others have gone up pretty significantly and we can only imagine they will continue to go up now that there is no competition to help keep the prices down. Consumers are not going to be happy.
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HD DVD fans are cheering while Blu-Ray fans are booing. The reason? Paramount and DreamWorks have decided that for the next 18-months, they’ll exclusively be releasing movies on the HD DVD format. Paramount has released at least 30 movies so far on both formats which makes sense, but they say that this change and exclusive commitment with HD DVD which includes Paramount pictures, DreamWorks, Nickelodeon, and more, was the result of “extensive evaluation of current market offerings.”