Some time back, there was news that HD DVD is dead or it will be, in few weeks. What more? The prophecy seemed to come true as Blue-ray won over HD and Toshiba decided that it will no longer produce HD DVD players and discs.

Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation said

“We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop.”

As one would have thought that Toshiba is surely going down, it bounced back with new speculations.

Recently, Toshiba released a new DVD logo and it seems that they are working to enhance the image scaling capabilities of its DVD players and possibly launching Internet enabled players.

So how would a consumer benefit from this?

An Internet enabled DVD player will easily transfer videos from the Web and then burn them to a DVD and DRM restrictions could still apply.

On theory, this might surely sound like a kick ass application but we need to wait and watch how it fares in its real test i.e with consumers. On the whole, the scope seems to be very limited. People would buy it just for downloading movies? It needs to have more real time feature like e-mailing, surfing the web in depth, storage for mass data and much more.

Coming back to movie downloads, how about introducing P2P sharing? This will enable users to share and post their home videos too, which can act as another YouTube. (By home videos, I mean, videos shot at home and not the ones downloaded off your comp :-P) Further, if they also come up with a few gaming pads to accompany, they can take the user experience to another level altogether. A device which enables you to view movies + download them + play games + store data and surf the web too! Hey, wait a minute! Does this sound like a portable PC? I guess it does. They can surely wipe off the competition with such a killer device provided the prices could be made reasonable.

This reminded me of Videocon’s Internet TV which had initially created a lot of buzz and then became a huge flop. Even the Internet TV lacked features like memory storage, and the TV sets resolution were not as great as computer monitor.

I do believe that such a concept has a huge potential but, I guess, it’ll take some time before man realizes how to manage the technology and reduce costs at the same time.

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