One of the marketing bigwigs behind Blu-ray has gone public with an astonishing claim that Toshiba has only itself to blame for the flop that was HD DVD.
Masayuki Kozuka, a planner for Panasonic's storage devices, believes it was not technical standards or studio support that handed the format war to Blu-ray, but Toshiba's decision to offer sale prices on HD DVD hardware for a limited period last November.
One day only, y'know?
Speaking to Nikkei Publications, Kozuka said: "I guess what sealed Toshiba's fate was its $99 pricing on Black Friday [in the US]. That pricing must have discouraged every manufacturer from entering the HD DVD player market."
Explaining the bizarre claim, he added: "I believe Chinese manufacturers' entry to the US market was [the] HD DVD supporters' last hope. Given the market price at $99, however, it became impossible for any other manufacturer but Toshiba to enter the market."
Downloads - no way
He didn't stop there with the strangeness - moving on to look at the predicted rise in movie downloads, Kozuka said: "Movie companies earn income by showing movies at theaters first and then by selling them as home video packages including Blu-ray Disc titles.
"Only after gaining the majority of their sales through these two business channels do they offer their content to video-on-demand, pay-per-view and TV broadcast services."
In other words, legitimate film downloads will come only after rights holders milk every other distribution channel dry. So, when might we get legal content from the studios then?
Not anytime soon, according to the Panasonic man. "Our associates in the home video department don't see any reality in the business of 'downloading an entire movie'. I'm not sure - about seven or eight years from now, though."
All we can say is to ask Mr Kozuka if he's ever heard of BitTorrent or The Pirate Bay - if he had he might come across as a little bit more credible and less of a suit.
Your comments (1) Click to add a new comment
jpatten
February 26th 2008
1. Sorry Mark, I hate to rain on your parade, but I just can't buy into your commentary. The Blu-Ray HD DVD debate was regularly distracted by all manner of nonsense commentary such as the porn industry picking HD DVD which meant that HD DVD would win the format war. The latest nonsense is the downloads myth. The simple fact of life is that the internet we have today cannot support mass downloading of 25GB HD movie files and it won't be able to do so anytime soon. I think Mr Kozaku's commentary regarding when films will be released for downloading is probably not that far off the mark. Currently most movie revenue comes from the sale of DVDs. The film industry will be reluctant to allow a third party like iTunes to interfere with this channel and to dictate what prices are paid for their content. This is what is currently happening in the music world and you can be sure the film industry will want this about as much as the proverbial hole in the head.
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