Retailers abandon HD DVD

The victory of the Blu-ray DVD format over HD DVD has gone from a warm possibility to certainty in the space of just a week, InformationWeek reports.

The death-knell for HD DVD sounded earlier this month when Warner Bros leapt off the technology fence and announced that it was backing Blu-ray.

That prompted a frenzy of doom-saying about HD DVD, which in turn prompted two giants of US retail, Wal-Mart and Best Buy, to drop their support for the format in order to eliminate customer confusion over having to choose between two competing technologies.

The biggest blow came on Tuesday this week when the company that has been the driving force behind HD DVD, Toshiba, announced that it would stop selling HD DVD players, recorders, and disk drives for PCs by the end of March.

And now Amazon.com has announced that henceforth it will only promote Blu-ray DVDs, and has started offering new release HD DVD movies at 30% to 50% below the original price.

Game, set and match.

 

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