I don’t see Toshiba rolling out DVD Download DL players, which will have “super upconversion”, but not have HD DVD processing power.

What it may wind up being is a trojan horse strategy. Get everyone to grab onto DVD Download DL, and then add the HD option later. That would actually make a lot of sense, considering that you would, as has been said above, need high levels of player support to get studios onboard.

I do agree, that a slightly-downsampled DVD 720p24 would work well for this, with the second disc containing the Digital Copy and bonus content. If Blu-Ray makers are having to offer a DVD bundled with their BD for the Digital Copy, why not stuff the SD content onto that as well?

This thread, http://www.amazon.com/tag/hd%20dvd/forum?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1LBDSMFH3XYPS&cdThread=Tx3TKJOVC8K0OKX, includes a comment by someone who has read the DVD Download/DL spec. He says it’s essentially a “Download and burn” kiosk system – you’ll go to a store, buy something obscure, and they’ll burn it for you at the store. This isn’t a new idea, it’s something the DVD Forum announced would be available a while ago but it’s taken time because of the whole need to produce something compatible with existing players yet including DRM strong enough for Hollywood to accept it.

Adding a “Download HD version” feature would be nice, and I know Hollywood wants to find a way to make downloads work, but a hybrid “Buy a disc and download some of the content” thing isn’t going to please anyone and it’s doubtful Toshiba is considering anything of the sort. It would offer fewer advantages than keeping HD DVD around and asking Hollywood to continue to support the latter format – which obviously they’re not going to do. The BD forum could kill such a “download” system by promoting combo- discs with Blu-ray on one side and DVD on the other. What would be the advantages of an HD download system over combo-discs? Anything at all? Both require more expensive players for the HD component, and one requires an Internet connection and subscription, plus a reasonable amount of local storage (eg a hard drive), to overcome buffering and bandwidth issues. Winner: Blu-ray combo discs, by a landslide.

It’s not going to happen. There are better ways to add HD content to regular DVDs, most obviously to mandate dual-layer discs with a MPEG4 720p24 version of the video (the audio can come from the MPEG2 DVD version) provided as an alternative video stream. I doubt Hollywood would support it unless it’s part of a larger effort that includes 100% online service (no discs to buy) at the end of the process, so I doubt anyone will go down this route either.

But the hard sell is going to be studios. All of the majors have now made investments in Blu-ray and BD-J for high-def and advanced features. Many of them have now announced that by late 2008 *all* of their Blu-ray titles will have BD-Live content. HDi tool vendors have dropped the tools.

So Toshiba will need to convince studios to invest in this new/old tech, authoring yet another HD version, and yet another tool set for interactive content. And for what? A middling format. If it is streaming HD content then it won’t be a big improvement over upscaled SD DVD content, due to bandwidth constraints. And it certainly won’t be close to HD Blu-ray content. So why bother? Why not just produce high quality Superbit style DVDs for the DVD market and Blu-ray for the HD market?

Toshiba’s best hope would be to get some Blu-ray players on board to support it, which would create a multi-format ‘universal’ player. But that’d undercut their own decks which won’t do Blu-ray because of their stubborn pride.

In the end I don’t see this impacting the market at all, it won’t amount to any competitive force on Blu-ray. And I’ll be surprised if they get any appreciable level of studio support.

The DVD Forum continues to bleed members, while the BDA gains members. The horses have left the barn, and it is on fire. Toshiba is still trying to close the doors.