Toshiba announced Tuesday that it will no longer develop, make or market HD DVD players or recorders. Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida told reporters “We concluded that a swift decision would be best.” He also said that last month’s decision by Warner Bros. Entertainment to release movie discs only in the Blu-ray format made the move inevitable.
This move makes Blu-ray the clear and sole victor in the war that was High Definition.
Toshiba Corp. said shipments of HD DVD machines to retailers will stop by end of March. Last Friday, the largest U.S. retailer, Wal-Mart, decided to sale only Blu-ray DVDs and hardware. Just five days earlier Netflix said it will stop carrying rentals in HD DVD. Blockbuster and Target have made the same move in past months to stop selling or renting HD DVD in favor of only selling and renting Blu-ray.
Microsoft doesn’t believe this move will slow or hurt sales of it’s Xbox 360 console.
What does this mean for Playstation 3? Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter stated that he expects sales of the PlayStation 3 to rise up to 10 percent as a result of the end of the format war.
My opinion: Perhaps if Microsoft had sold the 360 with a built in HD DVD player the HD war may still be going on as that would have put HD DVD players in the hands of every 360 owner, instead of just 300,000 Xbox 360 owners who also bought the HD DVD player add on for the 360. (About 1 million total HD DVD players have been sold worldwide, but only 300,000 were the 360’s add on.) Where as Sony making the Playstation 3 a Blu-ray player by default that is 10.5 million Blu-ray players in people’s homes just from purchasing a game machine.
