Wal-Mart to Drop HD-DVD

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Worse than anything else this week, perhaps worse than any news since Warner Bros. dropped HD-DVD just prior to CES … the world’s largest retailer has announced it is dropping HD-DVD.

A buyer in Wal-Mart’s video division wrote this morning on the Wal-Mart Checkout blog that the retail giant had made the decision following the Netflix and Best Buy announcements earlier this week.

According to the post, Wal-mart will be all Blu by June.

Suggestions (besides the doorstop idea) for your HD-DVD player: give it to the kids (they can still play DVDs on it) or to your parents or to charity … but don’t expect the agony to last much longer. In fact, sources say Toshiba is ready to throw in the towel, as I previously wrote.

Once this happens, you likely won’t see any new releases on HD-DVD …

So let’s gather up as many sayings as possible:

• The fat lady has sung
• Turn out the lights, the party’s over
• Stick a fork in HD-DVD, it’s done

That’s probably enough. The war is definitely over.

However, as I’ve said before, Blu-ray won this war, but in the long run will lose - to Video-on-Demand (VOD). And probably not that far down the road either. It won’t have too much time to gloat.