Recently US retailer Best Buy and internet movie rental company Netflix had announced they will be recommending Blu-ray over HD DVD and no longer stock HD DVD products. Then just yesterday Wal Mart announced its intentions to drop HD DVD products.

Now it is being reported that Toshiba itself is pulling the plug on the ailing format. While not officially confirmed from Toshiba itself, it has already been reported that the manufacturing plants in Japan are closing.

While the format was released earlier than Blu-ray, and devices being dramatically cheaper than Blu-ray devices (the cheapest Blu-ray player for a while being the PlayStation 3), it lost much support from movie studios last year when they were starting to jump to one format or another. Blu-rays were also outselling HD DVDs sometimes as high as 4:1.

There are two movie studios that only produce HD DVD movies, so it would be thought that the rumoured “escape clause” would probably have something to do with Toshiba or another one of its partners announcing its pull-out from the race.