News, Rumors, and Trends

DoubleTwist Doesn?t Do TiVoToGo

Yesterday’s other big news was the beta release of DVD Jon’s DoubleTwist software - a swiss army knife of multimedia conversion, sharing, and syncing. The feature (rightfully) garnering the most attention is the conversion of DRM-ed iTunes into unprotected MP3s behind the scenes for playlist synchronization onto non-iPods. Though, being a video geek my first experiments were with TiVo…

HDTV Sales Jump 27% in December, Research Shows

Sales of HDTV flat panels grew 27 percent in December, with plasmas losing ground to LCDs, according to research from Pacific Media Associates.

Toshiba Officially Drops HD DVD, to End Shipments in March

Toshiba has officially discontinued production of HD DVD players, confirming the rumors and reports of the format?s demise since late last week.

Toshiba Kills HD DVD

With the exception of ~1 million owners, the HD DVD story pretty much concluded when Toshiba pulled the plug today:

Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe