Last night Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida officially announced that his company would no longer develop, make or market HD DVD players. “We concluded that a swift decision would be best,” he said.

Later this week, Toshiba are expected formally announce that they have lost the HD DVD war. An unnamed source within the company has indicated that Toshiba are currently planning their exit from the next generation DVD business. 
Since Warner’s announcement that they would drop support for HD-DVD at the start of the year, U.S. majors […]

Despite assuring the public late last year that they had no intention of abandoning the HD-DVD format, Warner has issued a press release stating that beginning May this year, they will no longer release HD-DVD format discs.
Kevin Tsujihara, President of Warners Home Entertainment Groups is quoted as saying:

“A two-format landscape has led to consumer […]

According to a recent article at Gizmodo, there’s a bit of a split in the Blu-ray camp.  It seems that Sony, Pioneer, Sharp and LG are more than happy to stick to the 1.0 Blu-ray spec for as long as possible, while Panasonic, Samsung and Denon have all moved to version 1.1 and it seems […]

Gizmodo recently reported that both Video Ezy and Blockbuster have decided to exclusively support Blu-ray DVD rentals.  Certainly not good news for the HD DDVD camp.  Makes sense though - let’s face it, with the bottom line being the rental potential any rental company is going to look every PS3 sale as a future BD […]

OK, the report was comissioned by Sony but according to the latest GfK survey Blu-ray has around 95% of the Australian HD market.
From a report at the Smarthouse News website, there were around 18,000 Bd discs sold in October 2007 vs 2,000 HD-DVD titles.

In the U.S. last week there was a Blu-ray media event designed to tout the wonders of the BD format to the press. Mostly just the usual “Blu-ray will win the format war” stuff.
Of real interest though was a statement from Dan Silverberg, VP of high-definition media at Warner. 
“One thing that may be changing […]

Smarthouse News have recently reported that JB Hi Fi have done an about face on their Blu-ray exclusive stance. Effective immediately, they will be stocking both HD-DVD players and discs.
I’m not surprised. I’ve always thought that JB wouldn’t want to miss out on potential Christmas sales of HD-DVD players and big HD DVD exclusive titles […]

Some sales stats from a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald…

85% of high def disc sales are Blu-ray
From Jan - Sept 2007, 81,219 Blu-ray discs were sold vs 14,632 HD DVD discs
24 of the top 25 HD titles were Blu-ray. “300″ was the only big selling HD DVD disc which ranked 20th.
Only 1,644 Blu-ray […]

I’ve seen the announcements lately that Toshiba will be releasing HD-DVD recorders. That wasn’t unexpected and I didn’t really make comment on them.
Looking at their latest announcement though, that the recorders can record up to two hours of hi-def content onto a standard DVD-R makes things a little more interesting.
I don’t know all […]