Toshiba Ponders Next Move By Mark Fleischmann March 5, 2008 — How does Toshiba plan to move forward in the wake of HD DVD's demise? The company's CEO says improved DVD upconversion is among the strategies to be pursued. Here's a nugget from a Wall Street Journal interview with Atsutoshi Nishida: "If you watch standard DVDs on our players, the images are of very high quality because they include an 'upconverting' feature. And we're going to improve this even more, so that consumers won't be able to tell the difference from HD DVD images. The players would be much cheaper than Blu-ray players too."

Mr. Nishida confirms that Warner's decision to stop supporting HD DVD was a key factor in Toshiba's withdrawal of the format: "I didn't think we stood a chance after Warner left us because it meant HD DVD would have just 20% to 30% of software market share. One has to take calculated risks in business, but it's also important to switch gears immediately if you think your decision was wrong. We were doing this to win, and if we weren't going to win then we had to pull out, especially since consumers were already asking for a single standard."

He points out that the end of HD DVD merely reduces Toshiba's business units from 45 to 44, hardly a fatal blow. Among the rising stars is the company's PC division, "an even more important part of our strategy." He predicts that wired and wireless links between PCs and TVs will enable the computer's optical and hard drives to increasingly serve the television. Toshiba is also working on video-downloading technologies.