Right from the horse’s mouth:

Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD DVD Businesses
19 February, 2008

Company Remains Focused on Championing Consumer Access to High Definition Content

TOKYO–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. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.

HD DVD was developed to offer consumers access at an affordable price to high-quality, high definition content and prepare them for the digital convergence of tomorrow where the fusion of consumer electronics and IT will continue to progress.

“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.”

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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.

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Of course, anyone reading the site would have know of HD-DVD’s demise for some time now. Now bring on Transformers on Blu-Ray already.

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Watched Spiderman 3 and The Simpson’s Movie on Blu-Ray this weekend and the quality of the image over standard DVD is simply jaw dropping.

Oh… and in case you haven’t heard… the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray was is over.

For the week ending January 13th, the first full week following Warner’s decision to go Blu-ray exclusive, the Blu-ray camp had its most dominating disc sales week.Since the beginning of 2007 Blu-ray has outsold HD DVD by an average of nearly 2:1, but the week in question saw the gap get even further. Blu-ray took a dominating 85 percent share of all HD discs sold.

HomeMediaMagazine also reported that from the top ten selling discs for the week, none were HD DVD. The top selling Blu-ray Title “3:10 to Yuma” sold about ten times as many discs as the top selling HD DVD title, “The Kingdom”.

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