It’s been a tough week for HD DVD. Wal-Mart announced this morning that it will only stock Blu-ray Disc players and movies starting in June. This comes on the heels of similiar announcements by Best Buy and Netflix.
According to a company press release, the change will take place quickly over the next several months. Wal-mart will phase out HD DVD offerings and reorganize shelf space. By June, Wal-Mart and Sam’s Clubs will offer only Blu-ray movies and hardware machines, as well as standard definition movies and DVD players, and up converts.
“We’ve listened to our customers, who are showing a clear preference toward Blu-ray products and movies with their purchases,” said Gary Severson, senior vice president, Home Entertainment, Wal-Mart, U.S. “With the customers best interest in all we do, we wanted to share our decision and timeline with them as soon as possible, knowing it will help simplify their purchase decision, increase selection, and increase adoption long term. We anticipate enhancing our selection with continued great values in hi-definition Blu-ray products, so our customers can further enhance their entertainment experience at home.”
While many thought that the Woolies announcement wasn’t news, this has surely got to sting.
Wal-Mart’s news comes hot on the heels of a slew of announcements, including the rumor that Toshiba might pull the plug on the format in coming weeks. Stay tuned.
Someone’s format always ends up becoming the new standard. Every company that comes up with a format wants their format to become the standard. Same thing with Toshiba and HD-DVD.
A big difference with Blu-ray is that there are many more companies than just Sony that invested in developing the technology. The Blu-ray Disk Association (BDA) is comprised of close to 200 members.
You can blame this on Sony.... Trying to change the media World to their format.
I quit buying Sony products when they started going after people for downloading music on the internet.
A $150, 1080i, 30GB HD-DVD player IS technically “inferior” to a 1080p, 50GB optical, 40GB hard-drive equipped, bluetooth equipped, game-ready PS3 at $400.
actiondvdguy quote: “I thought being in the Home Theater business (like I am) would. I do think that my Accounting degree and Master of Business Administration helped me to decipher which format favored the consumer (HDDVD) vs. the format that favored the suppliers and retailers.”
Response: Unfortunately, cheaper is usually not better. The Japanese understood this and consistently called “HD-DVD” the “inferior” format. To a tech saavy culture (with lots of tech giant companies), hardware capabilities and limitations are what make something better. Software is not limited in itself - it is only limited by the hardware. Blu-ray has the greater hardware capability with higher storage potential and faster data transfer. HD-DVD, on the other hand, only made a small improvement over DVD in storage and they were not able to push it past DVD in data transfer (higher speed drives were not working out).
When you want to move to the next step in technology you can’t base it on cost alone. You have to make your basis on actual improvements to current technology. HD-DVD was a very minor improvement over DVD. Blu-ray took the improvement to a much higher level. Data storage capability alone compared, Blu-ray compared to HD-DVD is the same level of improvement in potential as HD-DVD compared to DVD. Why stop half-way in improving technology when you can go all the way?
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First of all M$ is not nickle and diming as VinTheDean has stated, they are offering… 
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