"If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value."
In this truly insightful interview the WSJ talks to Toshiba CEO Atsutoshi Nishida about his plans for the company after the failure of HD-DVD. I've read quite a few interviews with traditional Japanese CEO's, and Nishida is definitely a uniquely pragmatic thinker among them.
When asked why he gave up on HD-DVD so quickly, he responds that he knew that everything was practically over when Warner left, and offers the following business advice nugget:
I didn't think we stood a chance after Warner left us because it meant HD DVD would have just 20% to 30% of software market share. One has ...
In an effort to move on from the HD DVD demise, I wanted to discuss two recent bits of Blu-ray news that caught my attention today:First off, we have word from Wired that Blu-ray drives in laptops may wreak havoc on battery performance. This makes sense, and it would have been an issue for HD DVD as well because both formats required significant CPU horsepower to decode their massive video files. Now that we're beginning to see hardware Blu-ray decoding built into newer notebook graphic cards, it should become less of a problem. Wired notes that another factor in this ...
Now that Toshiba has officially thrown in the towel, I think it's worth considering where this leaves us and the HD disc market. Will HD DVD's death mean Blu-ray will instantly become a must own product? Or is it merely going to just move over HD DVD purchasers and remain second fiddle to DVD? Here are a few of my thoughts on what this means for the state of HD media.
The Good
Less confusion when it comes to HD disc purchases
Although the niggling profile issue with Blu-ray will be an even more obtuse difference to typical consumers
Increased movie releases as studios ...
In a surprise move today, Netflix announced that they would be moving towards exclusive Blu-ray support. You can read more about the announcement here, or on practically every other tech site out there.
Now I understand why they made the decision. After all, it makes complete business sense. Ever since the Warner Brothers move, it was clear that Blu-ray was going to win this format war sooner or later. It also must have been a huge pain for Netflix to support Blu-ray and HD-DVD concurrently, all the while keeping the standard DVD format on tap as well. So it makes sense ...
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