Toshiba has had a rough year as they've watched HD DVD rather quickly fall to the bottom and eventually get discontinued. February 9th was the day that they made the official announcement that they were going to stop development, manufacturing, and marketing of HD DVD players and recorders.
We weren't expecting the announcement from Toshiba for another week, but it's official, HD DVD is now discontinued. In the press release from Toshiba, they stated that after reviewing their strategy for HD DVD, they decided to stop development, manufacturing, and marketing of HD DVD players and recorders. President and CEO of Toshiba was quoted in the announcement saying, "." Next up? Not Blu-ray.
Toshiba is about to say farewell to HD DVD after a long hard battle. HD DVD was originally developed and designed to be the successor to regular DVDs, and they officially launched in the United States back on April 18, 2006. Their biggest problem all along has been Sony's Blu-ray, their direct competitor which launched a few months after they did.
When it comes to the high-def format war I don't think there is much arguing that Blu-ray is emerging as the clear winner. Within the last week Netflix announced that they are starting to phase out HD-DVD's from their rentals, and then shortly following them Best Buy said that they will start recommending Blu-ray to their customers.
Netflix just announced today that they will be acquiring no more HD DVD titles as they begin their transition to Blu-ray as their sole high-def DVD format. This might be the nail in the coffin for those of you who were still skeptical about a clear winner already emerging in the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD format war.
This is not good news for the HD DVD camp if it turns out to be true. According to The Digital Bits, Paramount and Universal will be following the footsteps of Warner Brothers and making the big switch to Blu-ray. That means that HD DVD is seriously wounded in this battle and they're about to lose big-time to Blu-ray.
We've been talking for over a year now about the "war" between HD DVD and Blu-ray and who would come out of this the clear winner.
Nero is undoubtedly my favorite software for burning CD’s and DVD’s, and on October 1st they will be releasing Nero 8 to their worldwide audience. Seeing that Nero 7 has been around for nearly 2-years I think that a big update is well overdue.
So yesterday, people were giving credit to Michael Bay (director of Transformers) for “standing up to Paramount” after their decision to back HD DVD instead of both Blu-Ray and HD DVD. He was quoted as saying “”
HD DVD fans are cheering while Blu-Ray fans are booing. The reason? Paramount and DreamWorks have decided that for the next 18-months, they’ll exclusively be releasing movies on the HD DVD format.
