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The HD-DVD has lost to its formidable foe Blu-ray. It seems the all intense war between these advanced disk technolgies is finally over and that Blu-ray will take the world into the next generation. Things pretty much went downhill for the HD-DVD camp when many rental services and retail outlets (*cough netflix and Bestbuy) began supporting Blu-ray a few weeks ago and announced that they would stop promoting HD-DVD products. This caused a flurry of panic and soon after major movie studios began forming alliances with Blu-ray and eventually Toshiba the HD-DVD producing giant finally realized that they would have to cut their losses and surrender. Toshiba who has mainly kept HD-DVD alive had to give in to the pressure around as basically everyone abondoned the HD-DVD format. As a result, Toshiba said that they would produce Blu-ray technology. This essentially ended all support for HD-DVD, except of course for Microsoft, the makers of it. Supposedly, however, they will begin supporting Blu-ray technology as well since it's all about business and not pride. Even Toshiba is proclaiming that they still think HD-DVD is superior, but after all they are in the game of business and so they must go with the flow.

All in all, it has been fun following the format war, seeing top company execs make fun of each other and denounce the other side. Now I guess Sony actually may sell some Playstation 3s although I do hear that Microsoft is considering making Blu-ray drives for the Xbox 360. I'm just glad I did not buy a HD-DVD drive for my xbox as I was about to since they were on discount. Now we can all rest assured that the Blu-ray drives we buy in the future will be around for some time (prolly a couple years until another format becomes popular).

More on what HD-DVD and Blu-ray really are:
Blu-ray wiki page
HD-DVD wiki page

Read more about it here:
Engadget retrospective