HD DVD Finally Surrenders

It’s official. HD DVD is dead.

It’s official: Toshiba announces HD DVD surrender

“The two-year war between HD DVD and Blu-ray officially ended early Tuesday morning as Toshiba waved the white flag and declared it would stop producing HD DVD products. The company, which began sales of HD DVD in March 2006 with the HD-A1 player, “decided it was not right for us to keep going with such a small presence,” according to chief executive Atsutoshi Nishida. The Blu-ray format is now the definitive winner in the war and stands unopposed as the optical media replacement for DVD. Toshiba’s press release goes into a bit more detail: ‘Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe, yet will continue to make efforts to meet customer requirements. The company will continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives within the overall PC business relative to future market demand.’ Three movie studios currently support HD DVD–Universal, Paramount, and DreamWorks Animation–but we expect them to follow suit and announce support of Blu-ray sooner rather than later.”