Blu-ray to win HD war?

Toshiba set to pull plug on HD-DVD

By Mariko Sanchanta in Tokyo and Paul Taylor in New York

Published: February 17 2008 19:18 | Last updated: February 17 2008 19:18

The two-year battle over which technology will become the industry standard for the next generation of high-definition DVDs looks set finally to end this week after Toshiba gave the strongest sign yet it would exit its HD-DVD business.

The move follows Friday’s announcement by Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, that it would no longer stock Toshiba’s HD-DVD discs and players and was instead committing itself exclusively to the rival Blu-ray format backed by Sony.

Warner Brothers, Hollywood’s largest player in the home video market, made a similar decision last month, putting strong pressure on Toshiba, which has been the driving force behind the HD-DVD format that is also backed by Microsoft.

Early on Sunday, Toshiba said “no decision has been made”, but added the company was “making various considerations about its business policy after Warner’s decision and the announcements by Best Buy and Wal-Mart”.

But the Japanese electronics and energy group is keen to stem its losses from its HD-DVD investment and people familiar with the situation say it is likely to pull out, particularly following Wal-Mart’s announcement.

Such a move would not surprise US analysts, most of whom viewed Warner Bros’ announcement early in January that it was abandoning HD-DVD in favour of Blu-ray as signalling the end for HD-DVD.

Nevertheless, HD-DVD’s fate looks as if it will ultimately be sealed by retailers rather than technology companies. As Andy Parsons, chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association US promotions committee, said at the weekend, “retailers have a tremendous impact on consumer preferences, and as the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart’s reach and leadership are unparalleled”.

The emergence of the Sony-backed Blu-ray as the definitive next-generation DVD format is expected to spur sales. Most consumers had been sitting on the sidelines over the past two years, unwilling to be stuck with an obsolete format while the battle raged.

Toshiba’s mooted decision is not expected to be met by opposition from members of its camp. Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD-DVD backers that would allow it to switch sides.

In a last-ditch effort to save the HD-DVD format, Toshiba last month slashed prices on its players by as much as $50, but sales remained sluggish. Last year, according to Home Media Research, Blu-ray outsold HD-DVD players by three to one in the US. In Europe, the ratio was 10 to one in Blu-ray’s favour and in Japan the ratio was 100 to one.

Wal-Mart, which has long reigned as the biggest seller of DVDs, said its decision to carry only Blu-ray discs and players was a response to customer preference. It follows similar moves by other large retailers, including Target, Best Buy, Netflix and Blockbuster.

Archos TV+ In UK

Archos TV+ launched in the UK

A European (OK, French) company reckons it has a product that beats Apple's

February 7, 2008 11:40 AM

Archos is taking on Apple with a Wi-Fi-enabled digital set-top box, the Archos TV+, which UK boss Tony Limrick unveiled yesterday in London. It starts as a simple PVR or DVR (Personal or Digital Video Recorder) that can record TV programmes. It also lets you stream files to your TV from your PC. Add the Opera browser (at extra cost) and you can surf the web on your TV screen, using the little Qwerty remote supplied. You can also sync your TV programmes with your Archos PMP (Portable Media Player) and take them away with you.Limrick describes it as "the missing link" between your TV and the net (no PC is required), and reckons Archos has succeeded where other companies (cough*Apple TV*cough) have tried and failed.

He's certainly undercutting Apple on price: in the UK, the Archos TV+ costs £179.99 for the 80GB version and £249.99 for 250GB. But you may also have to add £19.95 for the Opera browser. The MPEG2 and H.264 codecs are also extra-cost plug-ins. This probably isn't going to go down too well with buyers, but Limrick says that this way, users don't have to pay for them if they don't want them. (US prices are $249 and $349.)TV programmes are recorded in VGA format (640 x 480), and there's no HD support at the moment. Archos does support DRM-protected WMV and WMA audio and video files, so you can use most music libraries, except Apple DRM-protected iTunes.The TV+ also has a USB port so you can transfer photos from a PC or digital camera and show them on your TV screen.The TV+ is based on Linux, like the TiVo.There are, obviously, other things on the market.

The Microsoft Xbox 360 is another way to get PC content on a TV set, though it doesn't record TV programmes (unless you get them from an IPTV supplier such as BT, I think). You can roll your own media center with Linux and MythTV, and so on. But Archos could succeed by providing a small, smart-looking box that makes it simple, at a reasonable price.This whole market has been a bit of a flop so far. Are people simply not interested, or are they just waiting for the right product to come along at the right price? If so, has Archos nailed it?

Read me first Apple users are special: they're happy to pay for their software

Read me first Apple users are special: they're happy to pay for their software

Andrew Brown
The Guardian,


I had to help a friend buy a new computer the other day, which meant escorting her around the Apple store. Since she is on broadband and knows nothing about internet security, it was the obvious thing to do. It's perfectly possible to run Windows securely and reliably and I do so myself, but if you don't want to bother with security at all, a Mac is undoubtedly less trouble.
For one thing, it comes without any of the expensive and inefficient "security" programs that clutter up most mass-market PCs.

Whether it is in any other way better than a modern PC is a question with an unobvious answer. It's very hard to think of anything that is possible only on a Mac, and the idea that one interface is more intuitive than the other seems to me palpable nonsense. Both are reasonably consistent, and both rely on conventions that have to be learned.

But there is one difference that has me tempted to move over myself, and that is the existence of a real software market on the Mac. On Windows, this hardly exists. I know that sounds an outrageous statement, since there are hundreds of thousands of programs available for PCs. But almost all of these sell in tiny quantities: all the stuff you actually need to run your life on a Windows computer is either free or compulsory.

Web browsers are free, obviously. The same is true of most communications programs, whether messengers or email. The office software market consists almost entirely of Microsoft Office, which is either bundled or bought by your employer. If you are not using that, there is OpenOffice, which is free, and about which I've written previously (If this suite's such a success, why is it so buggy).

With the exception of some copy-protected music and graphics programs and some high-end programming tools, there's no more need to spend money on modern Windows software than there is on Linux; the cynic might say there was even less need, since I would pay happily for Linux software that was responsive to users' needs and not programmers'.
But Mac users do pay for the software they use. They even pay for their operating system upgrades. There is much less of a tradition of cost- bundling on Macs than on Windows, and the result has been that software is built to appeal to people spending their own money.
There are real alternatives to Microsoft Word, not just from Apple, such as (Mellel), a word processor for people who write books. There is an abundance of notetaking programs: this is also an area where there is a market on the PC, but it seems much less vigorous and innovative than on the Mac, partly because everything that grows sufficiently complex to be useful withers under the shadow of Outlook.

I know that Apple, just like Microsoft, has crushed utility programs by incorporating their functions into the operating system; but it has not been as strong, and so its malevolence has done less harm.

Perhaps the smaller size of the Mac marketplace explains its vigour and diversity. Most of the really interesting and useful programs in the world seem to have been produced by five people or fewer. There is no substitute for a programmer who talks with his customers directly, and they will only exist in a market where the customers are the users, and not the people running the users' employers' IT departments.
Beyond that, there is the imponderable factor of snobbery. Mac users so sincerely believe themselves superior to the rest of us that it's possible that this makes them pay more attention to style and finish.

Style isn't a superficial characteristic that can be changed like an overcoat. It is something much more like skin, organically connected to the deep structures within. And in the best programs, there is a sense that what you see is directly related to what the program does; and this seems to me more common among Mac programs than PC ones.
It is the kind of design that is so good it disappears that might be worth paying for.