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The Format War Is Almost Over

Update (2/19/08): Things change pretty quickly with technology.  We wrote this original post on Monday, and Tuesday morning Toshiba made an announcement that it:

has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.

Toshiba says they will continue to support existing HD-DVD players and that they have no plans to support Blu-Ray.

So that's it folks, the format war is over, Blu-Ray has officially won.  After holding out for years, the end came pretty swiftly for HD-DVD.  Hopefully this will prompt consumers who have been on the fence to purchase Blu-Ray players andprompt studios and other content producers to ramp-up their creation of HD content.

Original post below.

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The death knell for HD-DVD continues unabated.  In the past several weeks we've seen:

• Warner Brothers commit solely to Blu-Ray
• Netflix stop offering HD-DVD movies
  
• Best Buy publicly say they will promote Blu-Ray over HD-DVD
• Wal-Mart announce they will stop selling HD-DVD players this summer
  
• Sonic Solutions announce they will no longer support HD-DVD authoring tools
  

It's unclear how much longer Toshiba can or will hold out before admitting they have lost the format war.  Rumor has it that an announcement is imminent.

See our blog for more details.

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One Year And Counting

Sunday marked one year until the February 17, 2009 demise of analog broadcasting.

Despite the hype, most people won't need to do anything.

The only thing that is changing is that analog over-the-air broadcasts are stopping. If you get your television signals from cable, satellite, fiber, Internet or some method other than rabbit ears or a roof antenna, you don't need to do anything. Also, if you have a set with a digital tuner (one bought in the past year or so) and you use an antenna, you probably still don't need to do anything.

Read more about the change and learn what you might need to do at our blog.

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