HDTV – Page 4 – Graves On SOHO Technology

Now That The HD Disk War Is Over….

May 5, 2008
Michael Graves
HDTV, Video

It certainly appears that HD-DVD lost. But it also appears that Blu-Ray did not win. Yes, this was a classic lose-lose situation. For all it’s back room dealing Sony may blow this in the end.

Blu-Ray sales peaked for a few weeks in January but have since slumped. Consumers just may not see value in the price of the players or the media. Ars Technica has the details.

Wait, the price of Blu-Ray players has actually been on the rise since Toshiba conceded the battle! Even I, who still has a first generation Toshiba HD-XA1 HD-DVD player, won’t be buying a Blu-Ray player any time soon. They’re just too expensive.

Did Toshiba Drop HD-DVD Too Early?

February 25, 2008
Michael Graves
HDTV

Alec Saunders (a fellow Canuck) has an interesting observation about Toshiba and HD-DVD. IMHO, Toshiba’s comment doesn’t take into consideration Blu-Ray. Not making that statement is political face-saving on their part. Alec argues that they need to move the entire…

HD-DVD Merchandising At Fry’s: The Look And Sound of Incompetance

February 11, 2008
Michael Graves
HDTV

I took this picture with the camera in my Blackberry Pearl back in November 2007. I was at Fry's Electronics in Houston to pick up a few things and thought I'd swing by the TV department to see what was…

Netflix Dumps HD-DVD

February 11, 2008
Michael Graves
HDTV

Sigh, I guess this really is the end of HD-DVD. Today I received a nice email from Netflix telling me very simply that they won't be handling HD-DVD any longer. They'll continue to distribute the discs that they have, but…

HD Downloads From iTunes

January 20, 2008
Michael Graves
HDTV, Video

It’s Sunday afternoon here in jolly (but exhausted) old England. I just caught a post by George Ou at ZDNET called “Don’t believe the low bit-rate ‘HD’ lie.” It’s right on the money about the reality of downloading HD content as proposed by Apples new iTunes service.

There’s more to HD than spatial resolution. Just as a cheap digital camera might take pictures with a lot of pixels and nonetheless turn out lousy images. Bit rate matters, even given consideration for various compression schemes.