As expected, Toshiba CEO Atsutoshi Nishida today announced that the company “will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders”.

The press release made no mention of T now joining the rival Blu-ray Disc Association, but Toshiba will aparently be working on flash memory, small hard disk drives, next-gen CPUs, visual processing, and wireless & encryption technologies.

…some commentators suggest that the success of Blu-ray won’t come until Blu-ray players are reduced in price to the range of $200-300. Others say that the main competition for Blu-ray will be from DVD players that can upconvert/scale to near-hi def quality. And, Blu-ray is expected to enjoy about 5 years of growth until the next big medium arrives, currently expected to be digital downloads.

In the period from March 2006 to February 2008 Toshiba shipped approximately 1.3 million HD DVD units world-wide, of which 710,000 were stand-alone players.

Sony seemed determined not to lose this high-def format war, apparently out-spending Toshiba by a factor of 10:1 in marketing efforts.

Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD DVD Businesses - Toshiba press release, Feb 19 2008

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