Toshiba Officially Announces HD-DVD Exit

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Although as early as Saturday NHK had reported the decision by Toshiba to drop HD-DVD had already been made by Toshiba, the company did not publicly announce it - until today. In a press release, Toshiba announced the decision, couching it in terms such as attempting to “help the market develop.”

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.

“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.”

I’ll bet they’re disappointed for “the company. ” This is really going to hit their bottom line. More details:

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.

At least you can expect full support on previous purchases, though I would not have expected anything less. Toshiba has notebooks with HD-DVD drives and though they didn’t really say it (in fact, they mention assessment of it), I wouldn’t expect more to be made.

What now?

Expect Toshiba and Microsoft to start working on getting Blu-ray licenses from Sony (if they haven’t already).

Expect Paramount and Universal to announce Blu-ray support (any time now, guys)

Expect a win for consumers as more Blu-ray OEMs will (hopefully) mean lower prices.