There's an open standard for digital downloads that works, is proven, integrates well with hard media, and has superb audio and video quality. It was built by a coalition of the industry with such heavyweights as Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft, and others making it work.
Alas, Warner announced they weren't going to support it any more last January, and Toshiba - who thus far had made most of the players but had omitted most of the features necessary to make them work as STBs for the downloads side of the standard - pulled the plug in February.
Yes, I'm talking about HD DVD.
It's all fairly funny in many ways. Warner pulled support because, supposedly, it didn't want a "format war". Yet it pulled support in favor of the format that competed with - instead of embracing - online downloads. So we're stuck with a format war anyway.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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There's an open standard for digital downloads that works, is proven, integrates well with hard media, and has superb audio and video quality. It was built by a coalition of the industry with such heavyweights as Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Disney, Microsoft, and others making it work.
Alas, Warner announced they weren't going to support it any more last January, and Toshiba - who thus far had made most of the players but had omitted most of the features necessary to make them work as STBs for the downloads side of the standard - pulled the plug in February.
Yes, I'm talking about HD DVD.
It's all fairly funny in many ways. Warner pulled support because, supposedly, it didn't want a "format war". Yet it pulled support in favor of the format that competed with - instead of embracing - online downloads. So we're stuck with a format war anyway.