It had been speculated but Toshiba finally brought the curtain down on the high-definition (HD) movie war with Blu-ray today by announcing it’s pulling the plug on HD DVD.

“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.”

Toshiba will scale back production of players from now and cease altogether in March. The question now is when will Microsoft ditch it’s HD DVD add-on drive for the Xbox 360? Even more importantly, when will it launch a Blu-ray one or, slightly more radical, a 360 with an in-built Blu-ray drive?

The HD DVD format had a disastrous 2008 with more partner desertions than rats from a sinking ship, which has led to the end of the high-profile HD war with Sony’s Blu-ray format. It’s bad news for early adopters of HD DVD players and movies and a disappointment for those in the AV community that claimed HD DVD had advantages over Blu-ray as a HD movie format.

For the vast majority of consumers that have held-off buying into HD movies, things will be a lot less confusing in the coming months when all retailers will start pushing Blu-ray players. Hopefully, we’ll start seeing cheaper, dedicated Blu-ray players now since they have been way too expensive.-Martin Lynch

[Thanks to dbtechno for the image]

blu-ray HD DVD movies

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