Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market.
Th-tha-that’s all folks!
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.
Financial Times reports that Paramount Studios is going to use its escape clause to get out while it still can.
Meanwhile, since Warner went Blu, there have been many rumours that Universal Studios will also use its escape clause to jump in.
It seems that 2008 will declare Blu-ray the winner of the high definition disk format wars, and we can finally rest easy knowing our expensive Blu-ray players and PlayStation 3’s have a future.
Update
Here is the Financial Times article which says,
Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, is understood to have a clause in its contract with the HD DVD camp that would allow it to switch sides in the event of Warner Bros backing Blu-ray
But it isn’t known if Dreamworks (who is owned by Viacom who also owns Paramount) signed a similar deal.
