News

posted on 19 February 2008 05:45

It's over, Toshiba has announced its exit from the HD-DVD market. Sony's Blu-ray is wreathed in smiles.

Toshiba will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. The main thing constraining the post-DVD high-definition video disk format market has been dismantled by Toshiba's courageous decision to halt HD-DVD development in the face of general market preference for Blu-ray.

In a possible sign that either Blu-ray adoption or some other kind of convergence with Sony and its Blu-ray format is possible, Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation, said: "While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality."

Toshiba's in-house high definition video efforts will focus on high capacity NAND flash memory, small form-factor hard disk drives, next generation CPUs, visual processing, and wireless and encryption technologies.

The company expects to make announcements around strategic progress in these technologies in the future.

Its DVD products and work will continue with no change.

The company hopes to continue the relationships built up with movie companies and Microsoft during the era of HD-DVD evangelism. But the reality is probably that the movie companies will adopt Blu-ray - what else exists? - and even Microsoft may decide to do as the PlayStation III does and make X-Box a Blu-ray product.

So the cookie crumbles and we can be thankful that it has crumbled quite quickly, quickly enough for many, msany of us not to have bought either a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player/recorder. Now the way is clear.

Separately Toshiba will try to gain an edge on Samsung by building additional NAND flash manudfacturing capacity. Samsung is the leading NAND flash manufacturer with Toshiba in second place. Toshiba is hoping that, with Sandisk help it can build up its flash business.