Toshiba throws a "Hail Mary" to save HD-DVD

[john_nemesh]

From CEPro.com 1/14/08

http://www.cepro.com

01.14.2008 — With losses piling up faster than Wade Phillips’ playoff record, Toshiba is rolling out every trick in its playbook to counter the growing momentum that the Blu-ray format is building.

Faster than you can say, “a wide-open Patrick Crayton drops a Romo pass,” Toshiba has introduced an aggressive new pricing policy that is designed to help stem the swelling wave of support Blu-ray has garnered.

The recent announcement that Warner Brothers will only back Blu-ray starting in May and the grim attendance of its booth at CES last week have many pundits proclaiming the format’s death, even though Toshiba says it is committed to HD DVD.

The cuts announced today represent price breaks in the 20 percent to 40 percent range for hardware and software, representing what is probably the company’s last chance to save a format that is already positioned in the market as a lower-cost alternative.

Without sounding like one of those “I told you so types,” I did predict that Blu-ray would prevail, but I never thought it would go down like this and I never thought that Warner would make a decision so quickly.

I have two HD DVD players at home, and once I heard the Warner news, I—like many others that attended CES—came to the conclusion that HD DVD was essentially dead because it won’t have the necessary wealth of titles to back the format.

It was this sentiment that probably contributed to the ghost town-like atmosphere that enveloped the HD DVD booth at the show.

Now that it appears that Toshiba has fired the last bullet in its HD DVD marketing arsenal, I wish that the egos that run both technology camps could have sat down and ironed things out.

In the grand scheme of things, these groups could have acted in the best interest of the industry and consumers everywhere and worked out a compromise solution that would have saved everyone a lot of money.

It also would have saved a good company like Toshiba the humiliation of losing a very public battle.