14 DAY TRIAL // The official announcement made by Toshiba yesterday, within which it has acknowledged its defeat in the format war and has pulled the plug on the HD DVD format, has come as a surprise to relatively few people or organizations. However, although some companies had taken a bold step forward and had dropped HD DVD a lot earlier, the remaining supporters (probably contract-bounded ones) of the dead format have just now begun to set themselves apart from the loser of the format war.
But before we go any deeper into this overview of what's everyone doing in this particular field of the CE market, let's see what exactly are the "casualties" inflicted by Toshiba upon the customers. Thus, it seems that there were around 300,000 Xbox 360 HD DVD drives sold around the world, as well as an equally large number of PCs with HD DVD drives. However, things are a lot worse when it comes to standalone players, since around 600,000 units were sold in the US, around 100,000 in Europe and just around 30,000 units in Japan. Toshiba did announce that it will continue to support these early adopters, but, let's face it, all of those people (around 1.3 millions, if we do a little math) got screwed.
As mentioned earlier, several major names in the industry have already announced that they're ending all HD DVD-related business. One of the first was Universal Studios, whose president of the Home Entertainment division, Craig Kornblau, rushed to declare that "While Universal values the close partnership we have shared with Toshiba, it is time to turn our focus to releasing new and catalog titles on Blu-ray," adding that "The emergence of a single, high-definition format is cause for consumers, as well as the entire entertainment industry, to celebrate."
And while Universal's officials celebrate the end of their contractual agreement with Toshiba, Engadget reports that one of the most important gaming stores in the US, GameStop, is no longer accepting HD DVD movies as trade-ins, and several GameStops have apparently already stopped taking the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive as well.
Another important name that's leaving the HD DVD wreck is Japanese high-end A/V products' manufacturer Onkyo, who, according to the Yomiuri Online, will be discontinuing production of HD DVD players, but will continue to provide support for those who have already purchased the DV-HD805.
The Korean company Samsung has also announced that it will focus solely on Blu-ray in the future, thus dropping even the idea of a dual player. However, strangely enough, another Korean behemoth, LG, has announced its intention of continuing the support for those users who have already created their own personal HD DVD collection by launching new dual format players.
We'll probably hear about a lot more "defections" on the near future, so we'll leave this topic open and come back in a few days, but one's thing's for sure: with the ever-shrinking support for HD DVD, you, early adopters, should try to get rid of your machines as soon as possible, because, otherwise, you'll only have an extremely expensive upscaling DVD player laying around the house with no purpose whatsoever.
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