Toshiba throws in the towel - Blu-ray wins

We said it some time ago: The format war is over and now according to a Reuters Toshiba is throwing in the towel. One has to wonder how much money and effort was wasted on this struggle, as from the beginning it looked very obvious that Blu-ray is the stronger contender. For some reason the biased media wanted to raise hype over the so called ‘format war’, bash Sony/Blu-ray and give unrealistic hope for the HD DVD format. I can’t count the number of times that I read articles saying that it is ‘Betamax vs. VHS all over again for Sony’.

One has to wonder why two camps had to be formed, instead of every major vendor on the market to combine their efforts in order to deliver the best possible format for the market. Even Microsoft had to get involved and mix things up by showing some support for HD DVD, most likely just to piss off Sony, their main console rival at the time.

Things are actually looking bright for Sony. The critique against PlayStation 3 has ‘mysteriously’ silenced recently. The game lineup has improved, and PS3 has been proven to be very good in high definition video playback and has received praising reviews from home AV magazines recently. The sales are up, and for the first time PS3 sales exceeded Xbox 360 sales in January.

So the battle against the HD DVD is officially over, but the real war is to push Blu-ray to become a main stream format. It will be a hue challenge for the Blu-ray camp, so it will be interesting to see how they will proceed now that they don’t have to worry about HD DVD anymore.