They were at the cutting edge of TV recording when they were launched on a wave of publicity just 14 months ago.
But anyone who splashed out £450 on a state of the art HD-DVD high definition player could soon be counting the cost.
Comprehensively outsold by the Sony-developed rival Blu-ray, the Toshiba-backed player is heading for irrelevance, amid growing expectation that its Japanese manufacturer will abandon the technology within days.
An estimated 50,000 HD-DVD players have been sold in Britain — although Toshiba will say only that sales across Europe total 200,000 — as have about 275,000 films. Blu-ray, though, has built up an unassailable lead, with a little over 800,000 films sold in Britain since both technologies were launched. A similar pattern has been repeated globally.
Toshiba insisted yesterday that “no decision had been taken”, although private briefings in Japan indicated that the cave-in would come later this week. In Tokyo, Toshiba shares rose by 6 per cent, in the hope that it can save $450 million by walking away from its white elephant.
The result is mostly good news for British consumers, except those who bought the equipment. Michael Briggs, principal researcher at Which?, said: “If you haven’t yet bought a high-definition DVD player there is now no more confusion over which format to choose — only Blu-ray remains.” That is expected to lead to a substantial growth in high-definition sales.
Woolworth’s is to stop selling HD-DVDs from early March because customers bought Blu-ray, which outsold its rival “by about ten to one” over Christmas.
Five Hollywood studios back Blu-ray, after Warner Brothers said that it would switch to the format at the beginning of the year, leaving HD-DVD owners only with films from Universal, the King Kong studio, and Paramount, home to Transformers.
Alan Wilson, from Romford Home Theatre, a consumer electronics store, which promoted the HD-DVD format heavily online, said: “Warner decided the format war. We sold a lot of HD-DVDs in the early days, but in the last year there was a bit of a stalemate. It’s a shame: you can’t knock HD-DVD in terms of quality.”
Toshiba said yesterday that the players remained “far from useless,” with a library of 800 films available. Its HD-DVD players can help conventional DVD players to “scale up” and play films in near-high-definition quality, and with prices as low as £149 they remain far cheaper than their Blu-ray equivalents. A PlayStation3 with Blu-ray built in costs £279.99.
Blu-ray won because Sony built the player into the PlayStation3 games console. Although Toshiba had support from Sony’s games rival Microsoft, HD-DVD was not built into the Xbox 360, meaning that it was not a default purchase. In America, Blu-ray films are outselling HD-DVD releases by at least four to one; most weeks two thirds of players sold were Blu-ray devices. Blu-ray has built up a similar lead in Japan.
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