Rich Fiscus
3 Jul 2008 13:15
As the primary backer of HD DVD, Toshiba spent a lot of money developing technology that they didn't get a lot of use out of. Some features from HD DVD players, like upscaling, fit nicely into standard DVD players. Others, like web-enabled content, aren't quite as applicable. Sure you could put the same capabilities into a DVD player, but with no official standard you'd be hard pressed to get anyone to take advantage of it.
Now it looks like they're hoping to establish such a standard as DVD Download. At their last meeting in June, the DVD Forum's steering committee, headed by Toshiba, approved a logo for it.
Although it's not a definite sign that Toshiba will be adding any type of web-features to their DVD players, as one of the last major companies to seriously support the continued development of actual DVD technology (Blu-ray is separate from the DVD Forum), they may be in a position to push for adoption of HD DVD features in the DVD specs.
Combined with the continued work on China's extension of HD DVD, China HD DVD (C-HD DVD), it's possible they didn't actually give up on the format war with Blu-ray. Maybe they just figured Blu-ray would probably fail without any competition and are positioning themselves to pick up the pieces afterward.
Maybe if the industry as a whole had taken this sort of evolutionary approach from the beginning we would be talking about the amazing growth of DVD now instead of speculating on the future of Blu-ray.