So, I haven’t touched it but I followed this news closely using my Samsung Blackjack while on vacation (damn! I want an iPhone 
). So, Toshiba has now come out and said that they are discontinuing their HD DVD business. Here is the press release. I am surprised that it happened as quickly as it did, but I’m not terribly bothered by the news. I do now have a dead format in my Xbox 360 HD DVD player. I’m sure I will end up selling it to someone who has a large collection who would like a 2nd player (we’ll have to see what happens).
Also, now, Universal has announced support for Blu-ray. All that is really lacking is Paramount at this point…
No one should be terribly frustrated with this situation as this is the life of an early adopter. Oh, and by the way, I think everyone should ignore the talking heads on the news that suggest that all of this is for nought and downloads will come in and trump it all. Here are my reasons:
- Downloads are still slow (steadily improving)
- Limited title availability (more so than HD optical media from what I’ve seen)
- None, and I repeat, NONE reach the same quality level as Blu-ray or HD DVD
- No purchase options – every option I have seen is a transient rental option with no long term ownership. I don’t want (nor do I think many people would) to have to re-rent a title I enjoy watching repeatedly
- Storage space – assuming ownership is allowed. Storage space would be a major problem for more than a handful of titles. Backups would be even more of an issue…
- There is something about physical ownership of movies. So far, audio is different as it is something that is more engrained into our daily lives. People seem to want to OWN a physical movie and stick it up on the shelf…
A few more interesting points that I found on PS3Blog.net…