HD format war is over
It’s been a tough couple of years for both camps HD DVD (HD) and Blu-ray (BD). The consumers were hesitant to invest in either technology, the retail shops suffered from low sales. But now the battle is over. Here’s how it all happened…
- Jun 17th, ‘07: Blockbuster announced its plans to keep only Blu-ray movies in its stores, still offering HD DVD discs online.
- Jul 13th, ‘07: Tartan Video goes exclusively BD.
- Jul 25th, ‘07: Target choses to sell only BD players, but continue to sell discs for both formats.
- Jan 4th, ‘08: Warner Bros Entertainment announced to go exclusively Blu-ray. To be fair Warner was considering going BD since October ‘07.
- Feb 11th, ‘08: Netflix decides to stock only Blu-ray discs.
- Feb 12th, ‘08: Best Buy announced its plans to promote Blu-ray as an HD format of the future.
- Feb 15th, ‘08: Walmart announced to stop stocking HD DVD players in March.
- Feb 18th, ‘08: Samsung has revealed that they will start focusing on Blu-ray format.
- Feb 18th, ‘08: Niveus, producer of home media servers, has announced that effective immediately they will offer Blu-ray drives on all of their server products and will begin phasing out their HD DVD supplies.
- Feb 19th, ‘08: Toshiba (one of the major backers of HD DVD) after selling over a million HD DVD players, recorders and drives worlwide has finally decided to stop production of HD players in March, stating that “we carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,” (Atsutoshi Nishida, Toshiba president and CEO).
- Feb 19th ‘08: Paramaunt and Universal the last two major studios supporting HD DVD commit to Blu.
Our condolences to all early adopters of HD technology.
HD DVD rest in peace!
Tomb’s picture courtesy of EyeCraveDVD.com