The title of this article is WRONG.

Sony sold their Cell processing factory to Toshiba. NOT a Blu-Ray factory. Infact that is OLD news.

see usage limits and speed shaping are becoming more commonplace over the world so with HD movies being over 2 gig as a .mkv and say your like me and have a 40 gig limit a month what does that leave you with? and that is including all the other things like gaming, streaming TV?? and general web browsing.

i personally welcome blu ray since my housemate has a HDTV and surround sound so i can enjoy high def, but the cost of BR is still too much 40 – 50 bucks for one isnt worth it!! so if the costs go down i will be getting more BR eventually!

but still online is the future but the way the internets currently is, it is unlikely that with everyone and i mean everyone who has the net starts downloading HD content, the internets simply will die!!!

All HD movies will be sold for use on flash drives, and people won’t need an actual disc with the movie on it. For Sony to get $835 million for their Blu-Ray factory now is a great move.

Very dumb move by Toshiba though.

Now that’s a real disc… Blue-Ray is also yesterday like so much else. Give me some UHD please…

Sony HAVE NOT sold their BluRay factory at all. The Cell processor was jointly developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM. It is the factory that makes their cell processors that they are selling to Toshiba. Nothing to do with BluRay at all. Sony do have their own BluRay production plants but they also outsource in exactly the same way as they do with DVD production.

@34 hgf is correct.
Only a few countries have the infrastructure to provide full high definition downloads at the same quality, resolution and bitrate as the high def disc formats. Even then, most people will run into such nasties as traffic shaping, download quotas and everything else ISPs do to limit use.

5TB drives are coming in 2010.
Thats a collection of 600 hd-movies.
It will take a lot less place that 600 blu-ray cases no?

And especially when the whole business is going to disapper shortly once HD movies move onto flash drives.

Crazy world we live in.

All-star LED team quietly working on Blu-ray successors
Blu-ray is finally getting some momentum in the market, and two secretive start-ups are already looking at ways to replace the standard, or at least retrofit it.

Kaai and Soraa are trying to develop lasers and LEDs that could, conceivably, replace conventional LEDs in the lighting market and serve as a standard for optical data storage, Ford Tamer, the newest partner at Khosla Ventures, said in an interview. The firm has invested in both companies.

Tamer didn’t provide many details on the companies, but that’s par for the Khosla Ventures course. The company is placing many investments in companies that are still in the exploratory and scientific discovery phase and thus wants to keep a lid on details. Tamer did, however, say that Kaai and Soraa are both interested in the lighting and data storage markets. (And if anyone can ferret clues out of the “aa” in both company names, send it along.)

Both companies will exploit gallium nitride, which is also the basis for existing blue LEDs and blue lasers, although the technologies at the two companies differ from each other. Blue lasers, used inside Blu-ray players, would be used in far more movie players and computers than they are seen in now, but they cost too much, said Tamer.

Shuji Nakamura

(Credit: UC Santa Barbara)”We will go after lasers first,” he said.

What makes the companies intriguing are the founders Shuji Nakamura and Stephen DenBaars. Most Americans, even those in the tech industry, probably don’t know Nakamura, but in Japan and some electrical engineering circles, he’s a major celebrity.

Nakamura invented the blue LED in the early ’90s while working for Nichia. When combined with a particular phosphor, blue LEDs produce white light. Energy-efficiency white light LEDs will likely begin to replace incandescent bulbs in the future. (Blue lasers, of course, are also used to store data on Blu-ray discs.)

Nakamura also made history by suing his employer, which gave him a bonus of around $200 for his invention, and winning in court. The somewhat un-Japanese action on Nakamura’s part resulted in a settlement in the millions. He later became a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also won the Millennium Technology Prize. (You can read more in a biography of Nakamura by Bob Johnstone called Brilliant!)

“I was in Japan with him and people come up to him in the street for autographs,” Tamer said.

Stephen DenBaars

(Credit: UC Santa Barbara)DenBaars, a professor of material science at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is one of the leading researchers on LEDs. DenBaars has said that if 25 percent of the lightbulbs in the U.S. were converted to LEDs putting out 150 lumens per watt (higher than the commercial standard now), the U.S. as a whole could save $115 billion in utility costs, cumulatively, by 2025.

“They (Nakamura and DenBaars) found the next breakthrough in LEDs in 2000 and they have been working on it for seven years,” said Tamer.

Tamer, who formerly worked at Broadcom, will primarily focus on energy-efficiency investments. Earlier this month, for instance, the firm announced it has an investment in EcoMotors, which is developing diesel engines that could get 100 miles per gallon.

What else is Khosla Ventures cooking up? It has investments in G IV (semiconductor lighting), Seeo (a new type of polymer battery), Topanga (a plasma light similar to one produced by Luxim), and Lumenz (a zinc-oxide LED company).

Seems like Blue ray buyers got screwed just as bad as the HD buyers.

I guess epic widescreen movies like The Warlords require more – 2CDs then – but the average movie really doesn’t need HD, and it’s simply too much to download.

I don’t know when, but a it already exists.
Look at us who download hd-rips for example.

Also I saw on MTV Cribs thats 50cent has a system with over 3000 movies. The technology already exists. A 1TB hard drive is $350 CAN. A lot less then a blu-ray player. You can fit about 125 HD-movies (mkv) on 1TB. Thats less then 3$ per movie. And prices of hard drives are always going down.

The Future is Digital, not Discs.

So what are you doing here? You think people actually give a crap about HD? Scene movies usually come out under the 2gigs. Quality loss is usually minimal. Who would download a B-Ray movie as is?