HD DVD dies a natural death

The HD DVD disc format supported by Toshiba has died a natural death with the widespread acceptance of Sony’s Blu-Ray format. Toshiba has announced that it is throwing in the towel and calling it quits. What does it mean for the consumer like us?

It has been a while that the Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats have been at it around the globe. The general consumer attitude has been a wait and see attitude because of the confusion brought about by existence of two DVD format technology that is supposed to replace the current DVD standard.

Well things will now change with the announcement of Toshiba that it will now stop pushing for the HD DVD format. This means that the single standing format is now the Blu-ray DVD format by Sony.

Compare to about 10+ million Blu-ray devices sold around the globe, there’s about 1.3 million HD-DVD devices sold. Looks like those of you who bought an HD-DVD device will have to just charge it to experience and start thinking about buying a Blu-ray device.

I wonder what will happen to all those Xbox HD DVD units sold. Maybe Microsoft can replace the units with Blu-ray drives for the sake of providing better service for Xbox users.

For those who have been waiting, we can now plan on getting those new Blu-ray devices once the prices start going down. We’ll probably see at least a couple more years before we could see the impact of the current demise of HD DVD in terms of increase availability of Blu-ray movies and lower Blu-ray devices.

For now, ordinary DVD players still can’t be beaten in terms of widespread availability.