Saturday, February 16, 2008

Avoiding the next dusty door stop for your home


For those with long enough memories, back in the seventies there came the era of the videotape player, which featured a long tooth and nail battle between the VHS and Beta formats. A war which now seems rather quaint, considering the VCR for the most part gathers dust under your television set, a curious post modern museum piece that rarely, if ever, gets used anymore.

But in its day the battle for supremacy was pitched, Sony banked heavily on the Beta format, Panasonic, JVC and a host of others went with VHS and as history would show, it was a serious setback for Sony when the Beta format was finally rendered to history’s remainder bins. A business plan that no doubt provided for many rolling heads at the Sony World headquarters in Japan.

Fast-forward a few decades and here we are again, a new gizmo with an old debate and again soon, a new casualty.

The final nail in the High Definition DVD market may finally have been nailed this past week, when the American shopping colossus Wal-Mart decided that they will only stock Blu-Ray Video formatted discs in their stores, sending the folks at Toshiba to the capitulation table as they must surely realize that they have this years White elephant.

Word is leaking out that Toshiba has suspended production of their players and have a major announcement planned for next week, which will provide details on their plans to abandon the HD DVD product line, in effect offering up the white flag of surrender to the Sony Empire.

The move is expected to cost Toshiba several tens of billions of dollars, and will be seen as a certain setback to the electronics development program. HD DVD which was backed by Toshiba featured some high profile partners, including Microsoft and Intel who all seem to have backed the wrong horse in the ever competitive home electronics horse race.

After two years of competing spec sheets, exclusive deals with movie studios and other behind the scenes maneuvers the end is finally near, peace in our electronic age will be the call with Blu- Ray now the victor. (At least until the next great invention comes out, holographic video players anyone?)

Some thirty years later Sony will finally be back on top of the home video pile, the past ghosts of Beta long forgotten and the potential for billions of dollars in revenues just getting ramped up for delivery.

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