Kokul’s World

So it’s finally happened, the format wars are over and some camp has lost several billion dollars. The loser is HD DVD. They already were heading towards defeat when several studios switch to the other camp, but the largest and probably the fatal blow came when Walmart announced that they would be phasing out HD DVDs on their shelves to be completely replaced by Blu-Ray disks.

Toshiba, the backer of HD DVD, has announced it is discontinuing production of their HD DVD players. Microsoft and Toshiba just recently released a joint statement announcing that they are ceasing the production of HD DVD readers for the Xbox 360.

So for all you consumers who jumped onto the HD DVD boat, time to see if you can eBay those players at the last minute. Either that, or it might be time to retire that player to the basement where it can sit beside your old Laserdisc player and other technologies who have lost format wars and are now buried in the depths of history.