Toshiba Officially Announces Discontinuation and End Of HD DVD

Sony has emerged as a winner in the high definition and high density DVD format war and the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray is finally over! The famous Japanese multinational conglomerate manufacturing company, Toshiba Corporation has officially announced that it will discontinue its HD DVD business and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. However, the company will continue offering technical support to users of Toshiba HD DVD products.

“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,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. “While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality.”

According to the press release, “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.”

Anyway, this announcement provides great relief for consumers who are long in dilemma to choose between Biu-ray and HD DVD products. Blu-ray, pioneered by Sony, and HD-DVD created by Toshiba, the two incompatible and noninterchangeable formats have engaged in long bitter yet costly next generation DVD format war since 2006. Actually, lots of news media outlets have pronounced the death of HD-DVD and picked Bluray Disc as the winner when Warner Bros., one of the few major movie studios supports HD-DVD, announced that it would stop releasing movie titles in HD DVD by June 2008.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Computers & Electronic Gadgets. 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.