It was reported yesterday that Toshiba would make an announcement this week about HD-DVD’s future. It was pretty well speculated that this announcement would be the official end for Toshiba’s HD format. It’s not a surprise to see that this speculation came true, and as of this morning HD-DVD is finished.

Toshiba president Atsutoshi Nishida, explains the reason for throwing in the towel, “We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop”

Now that the format war is over, it’s time to analyze how this is going to shape the future of HD movies. This war like many in history did nothing but leave people confused, frustrated, and unsure about the HD market. So now that Blu-Ray is the clear cut winner, what kind of pricing changes can we expect to see? Along with this another question might be, how will this shape the next-gen system wars between Microsoft and Sony? It’s too early to answer any of these questions, but rest assured they will be answered soon.

It’s been analyzed by many experts as to what caused the downfall of HD-DVD. Many experts claim it was Blu-Ray’s massive advertising campaign, and HD-DVD’s lack of advertising that swayed consumers. Others claim it was Toshiba’s lack of scope in the market, not releasing their formant in different regions. Another claim is that Blu-Ray is just the technologically superior of the two, allowing for more storage capacity than HD-DVD. The exact reason might never be known because it was probably all of these factors that led to the format war conclusion.

R.I.P - HD DVD

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Consumer Electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.