Digital Home Thoughts: Microsoft and Toshiba Speed up HD DVD Adoption

"Microsoft and Toshiba will become partners in a new consortium aimed at imposing the HD DVD format as the successor of the standard DVD we’re all using today. Dubbed Advanced Interactivity Consortium (AIC), the new organization is aimed at promoting the advantages of the HD DVD format over its Blu Ray competitor and “to maximize consumer satisfaction worldwide by accelerating industrywide adoption of advanced interactivity and interoperability across a broad array of HD DVD products.” Microsoft and Toshiba plan to bring the interactivity features found in the HD DVD format (such as in-movie navigation, bookmarking and picture-in-picture, Web-enabled communities, content downloads and e-commerce stores to a broad range of services and platforms, including digital downloads to DVD players, PCs, TVs, cell phones, portable media players and game consoles."



While this certainly indicates a step in the right direction for Microsoft and Toshiba if they want to cement HD-DVD as a replacement to DVDs, I am not so sure if setting up a consortium is going to gain them much. Both Microsoft and Toshiba are powerful brand names themselves so I am unsure as to whether the AIC will dilute their support of HD-DVD or will it, over time, allow both these companies, and others, create an organization that can collectively launch HD-DVD to the heights in popularity that Microsoft/Toshiba envision.