Toshiba will continue to gain patent income from Blu-ray. This argument "Toshiba wants to kill Blu-ray because it doesn't make any money from it" is ""fanciable nonsense".
All Blu-ray players will, for the forseeable future, be DVD compatible. Toshiba will continue to reap the royalties it always has. In the mean time, it wants to make money from a low cost, popular, proven technology instead of investing millions in a technology that's far from proven and looks likely to be displaced by online services in the next few years. Good for it. If I were a Toshiba shareholder, that's exactly what I'd want them to do. And I don't blame them for comparing to Blu-ray (or HD DVD) - that's what people want to know - and most people, honestly, have enough difficulty telling the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray disk that I can honestly see Toshiba's upscaling as being "good enough" for the vast majority of consumers.
And until I read the other day that Engadget is owned by WB, I didn't know why Engadget continues this hate-on it has for Toshiba. WB wants to push Blu-ray. It knows that the technology only has a few years of life in it, and it wants it to at least live as an alternative once an online-based system has become standardized and made to work. If Blu-ray fails to make any impact - and, let's be honest, 80-90%+ of Blu-ray players are games consoles, the market for standalone players is virtually non-existant - then the investments WB and the rest of Hollywood have made in the technology are simply pointless.
So we see the once respectable HD blog whore itself to the point that it will not criticize any aspect of the technology, even the show-stoppers - such as BD+ - that'll make it fail. It's a beautiful thing that their lead story at the time of me posting this is about AnyDVD's BD+ support - you might not be able to play that BD disk in your standalone player because of the flawed copy-prevention system, but at least you'll be able to download a copy someone ripped from the same damned disk! Rather than hammering on Toshiba for doing the right thing, it's time they told their corporate parents to MAKE BLU-RAY WORK. Because no amount of advertising disguised as journalism is going to save Blu-ray if its supporters aren't willing to fix it.
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Toshiba will continue to gain patent income from Blu-ray. This argument "Toshiba wants to kill Blu-ray because it doesn't make any money from it" is ""fanciable nonsense".
All Blu-ray players will, for the forseeable future, be DVD compatible. Toshiba will continue to reap the royalties it always has. In the mean time, it wants to make money from a low cost, popular, proven technology instead of investing millions in a technology that's far from proven and looks likely to be displaced by online services in the next few years. Good for it. If I were a Toshiba shareholder, that's exactly what I'd want them to do. And I don't blame them for comparing to Blu-ray (or HD DVD) - that's what people want to know - and most people, honestly, have enough difficulty telling the difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray disk that I can honestly see Toshiba's upscaling as being "good enough" for the vast majority of consumers.
And until I read the other day that Engadget is owned by WB, I didn't know why Engadget continues this hate-on it has for Toshiba. WB wants to push Blu-ray. It knows that the technology only has a few years of life in it, and it wants it to at least live as an alternative once an online-based system has become standardized and made to work. If Blu-ray fails to make any impact - and, let's be honest, 80-90%+ of Blu-ray players are games consoles, the market for standalone players is virtually non-existant - then the investments WB and the rest of Hollywood have made in the technology are simply pointless.
So we see the once respectable HD blog whore itself to the point that it will not criticize any aspect of the technology, even the show-stoppers - such as BD+ - that'll make it fail. It's a beautiful thing that their lead story at the time of me posting this is about AnyDVD's BD+ support - you might not be able to play that BD disk in your standalone player because of the flawed copy-prevention system, but at least you'll be able to download a copy someone ripped from the same damned disk! Rather than hammering on Toshiba for doing the right thing, it's time they told their corporate parents to MAKE BLU-RAY WORK. Because no amount of advertising disguised as journalism is going to save Blu-ray if its supporters aren't willing to fix it.