Toshiba pushed HD-DVD against Blu-ray in the high-profile disc format war – and lost.

Toshiba then made Blu-ray a whole lot less desirable by selling low-cost DVD players that upscale to near-HD quality. I have a PS3 because it does many things well, and buy many movie DVDs, but have never bought a single Blu-ray movie disc.

Upscaling DVDs offers plenty good enough picture quality, DVDs are far cheaper and I want to play my movie discs on a choice of several players in different locations. I sure as heck am not going to buy a BD player for each room.

The much-vaunted European Blu-ray Disc Association, launched last year to try to kick-start press and trade interest, is now a broken reed. All that remains is a website.

When I recently asked why the BDA’s publicity people had stopped communicating – even on the key 3D announcement last Christmas – I got back the increasingly common PR person’s excuse for not doing proactive PR: “We post it on the Blu-ray Disc Reporter… With regard to 3D, this was a US announcement handled by the BDA’s US communication team. We reported it on the Blu-ray Disc Reporter but did not distribute the release.”

So to see if there is any news on Blu-ray in Europe, the press must go to a website, along with all the other thousands of websites that similarly inactive PR people expect the press to check every day in case there is any news that hasn't been proactively released.

No wonder Blu-ray is not exactly setting Europe on fire.

3D is unlikely to get the Blu-ray fire burning, either, because it needs a new TV set, special glasses at £100 a pair and the very significant loss of picture brightness that viewers will only start to notice once they have grown bored with stuff jumping out of the screen.

Ironically, Toshiba may hold the key to kick-starting BD player sales.

In the USA, Tosh has just started to mount a price challenge to Blu-ray’s established founders. Its BDX-2000 player is selling for as little as $109. This is the lowest Blu-ray player price so far except for brief, limited-run promotions at $89 to $99 in 2009’s Black Friday weekend and year-end promotions.

And this comes as Toshiba assumes the hitherto unthinkable role of controlling the licences that companies need to make Blu-ray players.

Mitsubishi, Thomson, and Warner Home Entertainment have lined up behind Toshiba to form the BD4C Licensing Group. This “one-stop shop” will make it easy for manufacturers to buy a licence to make Blu-ray “on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory basis” with royalties ranging from four cents a unit for a basic Blu-ray read-only disc to $7 a deck for a Blu-ray video recorder.

This should let China start churning out BD players at supermarket prices. Who knows, in a year or so, I might even start buying Blu-ray movie discs.

Barry Fox