Chronicle of the Hi-Def Disc Battles

February 20th, 2008

Filed under DVD & CD Writers

After having nothing but a rough year at every turn in 2008, Toshiba has formally announced its withdraw from the format war that has been plaguing consumers for the past several years. Last week Toshiba was dealt a series of blows that it simply just couldn't recover from and instead of creating more misery for the end user the decided to do the honorable thing and end production of HD DVD. This came in the form of NetFlix, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart all dropping support, all of which are big names to the average consumer.

In case you are wondering how it all played out, PC World has been gracious enough to throw a timeline together of the format war that goes all the way back to 2000 when Blu-ray first started being developed. We feel sorry for all the early adopters of HD-DVD, especially those that were snookered in by the low price and rebates that Toshiba offered during the 2007 holidays to boost sales. Toshiba has no plans to provide rebates to any of the early adopters, but they will continue service the devices as long as they are under warranty. Long live Blu-ray!

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