Toshiba to cease production of HD-DVD

Reuters has picked up a story from Japanese broadcaster NHK that Toshiba is planning to stop production of HD-DVD compatible hardware, allowing the competing Blu-Ray format a clear run. The news follows a series of announcements over recent days that major online and high street retailers will no longer support the HD-DVD format, the most well-known of these being Wal-Mart in the US. Toshiba is expected to suffer losses amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars from its failure in the format war against Sony’s rival Blu-Ray format, which has often been compared to the Betamax-VHS battle of the 1980s in which Sony lost out. The Blu-Ray format will now be free to face up to its real competition; the continuing success of DVD and the growing popularity of downloads from the internet and on-demand TV.