How Toshiba and HD-DVD Could Come Back

What Toshiba Could Do Next
1. The most attractive and apparently least risky path is to sue for peace. This is where the losing side goes to the winning side and says that for some predetermined consideration it will walk away and give up the fight. Sony and its partners might still be willing to pay a large sum of money and/or give Toshiba significant concessions to simply walk away.

2. Assess what it would take to move Time Warner back into the Toshiba HD-DVD camp and execute against this plan. All of the studios, thanks largely to the writers' strike, are looking at what will likely be a massively bad year when it comes to both revenue and profit (it should easily reach over a billion dollars by mid year). Sony likely already paid it a lot to make this move, but if Sony paid the subsidiary Warner Brothers, there is a chance the parent Time Warner could override.

3. Go after Disney instead. One of the mysteries in this segment is why Disney jumped from the HD-DVD camp to the Blu-Ray camp, and the back story behind that move might identify a negotiating vector that could open up a major opportunity for HD-DVD.

4. Do an end run and move to blended download and/or dual-mode devices. The market is moving to downloads, but it will take some time to get there. Offering a player that could both play HD-DVDs and gain access to the content already being licensed to Microsoft (which includes most of the Blu-Ray camp) could provide a compelling consumer mix of the present and the future. Were the company to subsidize a combination Blu-Ray, HD-DVD player, given that the existing content is split, it could put the consumer in the position to make the choice.

5. An interesting alternative or addition would be to work with Microsoft to create the same thing, but as a significantly improved and price-reduced HD-DVD enhancement to the Xbox 360, which has a market penetration of over four times the Playstation 3. Alone, I don't think this would be strong enough to change the outcome, but coupled with any one of all but their first plan this could ensure an eventual HD-DVD victory.

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