Here’s a belated Happy New Year!
We’re now well into 2008 and there’s been lots of activity in technology news this year, especially with regards to the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray “format war.”
So last week Toshiba made it official. If you haven’t heard about it yet, Toshiba announced that HD-DVD will be gone by the end of March 2008 — see news.com’s “Toshiba says to quit HD DVD” article. Netflix, Best Buy, Walmart, the Warner Brothers movie studio, and others all recently announced their preference for Blu-Ray over HD-DVD, so it seemed obvious HD-DVD would be in trouble. Shortly after Toshiba’s announcement, the other movie studios followed — see news.com’s “All Hollywood studios now back Blu-ray” article. And the HD-DVD player for the Microsoft Xbox 360 will be going away apparently — see engadget.com’s “Xbox 360 HD DVD now dead…” article.
Considering the media has been saying for months that the “war” will go on for years, it’s surprising that Blu-Ray would win all of a sudden. There were several large movie studios supporting HD-DVD.
So now I guess more people will buy Blu-Ray players along with HDTVs. This happened at a good time considering that come Feb. 2009, analog TV goes away. I know people who live in places where analog TV reception is poor and digital TV reception is non-existent, so they’ll have to get cable or satellite before Feb. 2009. Those converter boxes would be useless in that case. Might as well buy a HDTV to go with the cable or satellite service. That way it would be possible to watch those three dozen HD channels that cable and satellite companies offer. Might as well get all that you pay for. 🙂
On another topic, I’m still planning on a major update to my web sites. I just need some time to complete the design and the updates.
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