Toshiba’s sticking by its guns after losing the HD format war. Blu-Ray might be steaming ahead now HD-DVD is dead, but Toshiba reckons it’ll soon be killed off by downloads and streaming video.


At a Toshiba press event today, the company’s UK CEO said “We know Blu-Ray is growing, but the question is whether it’ll plateau and level off. I’ve just come back from Japan, where I saw technology that even upscales video from YouTube to HD.”

Is Toshiba still sucking on lemons after sinking a fortune into HD-DVD? Sounds a bit like it. The company sees downloaded video and web streaming taking off, and delivering HD without disks. But while we’re all for a bit of HD streaming, especially given the BBC iPlayer will go HD this month, we’re not pinning out hopes on it.

See, the UK’s average broadband speed is still hovering around the 2 meg mark, ruling out HD downloads for most. In the mean time, Toshiba still hasn’t launched a single Blu-Ray product.

TBC | £TBC | Toshiba

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  • Paul

    Toshiba have been an absolute joke since they lost the format war. One minute they are telling us physical HD media is the future and then as soon as they lose they suddenly switch to ‘DVD upscaling is just as good as HD!’ and now ‘Downloads will beat Blu-Ray!’.

    The simple fact is that HD downloads will not be anywhere near challenging physical media for at least another decade if ever.

  • http://www.gravatar.com James Holland

    In the UK, we’re still struggling with low average broadband speeds. Until fibre optic is widespread, HD downloads are simply unrealistic for most people.

  • MarkG

    Toshiba would say that, wouldn’t they…

    Seriously, Toshiba need to get over it, move and and release Blu-Ray, otherwise face being neglected to the back of the pack.

    There is no room for face saving. Microsoft made an ass of themselves with the “Downloads are the future” (read: we can’t licence Blu-Ray even if we wanted to) as so it seems now are Toshiba..

  • DaveBG

    The thing is, Toshiba are right.
    Blu-ray is not “steaming ahead” and there is no money in it for the CE corps.

    Even with prices in some cases falling to DVD levels the Nielson numbers show a steady weekly spend of about $10 million.

    Even with Batman TDK and Iron Man Blu-ray only took a true 4.45% of the market last year (forget the cherry picked numbers, that is the true total US DVD sales numbers v total US Blu-ray sales numbers)

    Not only does this mean that sales cvontinue to be very low (particularly in consioderation of all the PS3s out there) but now margins are almost invisible.

    All that money invested in ‘the new DVD’ and no-one cares.

    Netflix et al prove the day of the physical media is coming to an end.

    Internet speeds are rising everywhere.
    It’s just a matter of time.

  • http://www.electricpig.co.uk Lucy

    Toshiba is right, and maybe they had a lucky escape with the fail of hd dvd, no matter what it cost them.

    Blu-ray cant possibly last for anything other than storage reasons or for industry use. Yet again, as always, Sony have made something that simply wont work in the long run.

    Nice try though

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