While no official announcement of HD-DVD’s death has been released, you can almost smell it in the air. What has officially been announced is that Toshiba has been reviewing it’s investment in HD-DVD, which leads to the speculation of the announcement. A Toshiba official has said that the announcement could come as soon as Tuesday.

Looking back on the format wars it’s really hard to tell how Blu-Ray pulled it all off. During the beginning neither of the formats were selling well, considering a large portion of the public hadn’t and still hasn’t invested in HDTV yet. The movie studios looked pretty evenly divided as to what format they were releasing movies for. It seemed to happen so fast as well, before Christmas it looked as though the format war could go on forever. The technology looked pretty even as well, as Blu-Ray had a larger capacity, but HD-DVD was alittle more affordable.

So just what was “it” that helped push Blu-Ray over the edge? Many analysts believe it was all done through marketing, and just how much Sony invested in their marketing. Sony saw their big push around Christmas, which saw almost complete domination for Blu-Ray. I guess it just goes to show all the corny commercials on TV and the internet really can serve a purpose.

So what does this all mean for the consumer? Well Wal-Mart has officially released it will no longer be selling HD-DVDs, Best Buy will no longer put new HD-DVDs out, and Net Flix will no longer put out new HD-DVD stock for rental. The end of the format wars will go beyond movies, and into the video game market. It will be no surprise when PS3 systems see a significant increase in sells as they support the blu-ray format. This will be an interesting time for the Xbox 360, because while they supported HD-DVD, you had to buy an additional peripheral to play the movies.

So it’s looking like Tuesday might just be Judgement Day for HD-DVD supporters. I can’t wait to see all the quirky stories of what people do with their HD-DVD players, and just how much they will go for on eBay.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 9:51 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.