The announcement by Time Warner that they are abandoning the HD-DVD format has depressed many, and for most, has signaled the death of HD-DVD. To have an idea of the impact of this little drama, in the week following the announcement 6 times as many Blu-Ray discs titles were sold than HD-DVD. Such a disparity in sales was unthinkable even just a few weeks ago. But the HD-DVD camp has very quickly put their disaster-recovery plan into action w ith Toshiba leading the way in slashing prices on their players. Other initiatives are also quickly being launched. Toshiba is trying to convince the HD-DVD media manufacturers to lower their prices as much as possible in order to drastically undercut Blu-Ray prices. Paramount, still exclusively supporting HD-DVD, is going to launch as many titles as possible on hybrid discs, with an HD-DVD layer and a DVD layer, in an effort to bump up sales of HD-DVD players, which in turn should boost the sale of the discs. Across the battlefield, the Blu-Ray camp is also mobilizing. While they won't cut prices in the U.S., Sony and Sharp will offer a $400 rebate on the purchase of an LCD TV/Blu-Ray player package (PS3 not eligible). So things are still undecided, which at least has the merit of hastening the availability of HD movies. Of course, the big losers in all of this are the manufacturers who have already invested heavily in order to produce machines that support multiple formats (multi-format consoles that actually cost more than making one of each). [translation by msmith]

	Read more at Mac Bidouille
	www.hardmac.com/news/2008-01-23/#7648