HD DVD raising white flag
With Toshiba looking ready to abandon the HD DVD format, Blue Ray seems to have finally won the high-definition DVD wars. Bob Moon reports on what retail stores are doing with their HD DVD inventory.
HD-DVD recorders at a electronic shop in Tokyo on February 18, 2008. Japanese investors welcomed Toshiba's signals that it may abandon the HD DVD format, surrendering to rival Sony's Blu-ray in the battle to set the next standard of high-definition DVDs. (Yoshikazu Tsuno/Getty Images)
TEXT OF STORY
BOB MOON: There are all kinds of reports today that Toshiba is set to raise the white flag in the high-definition video war. The company says it could announce a decision as soon as tomorrow on whether it'll stop making HD-DVD players, but a lot of people aren't waiting. Wal-Mart dumped the format at the end of last week, and Perci Greenberg, who manages a video store for a small chain called TLA Video in Pennsylvania, has been expecting this.
PERCI GREENBERG: To be honest, we actually got a memo from our main office that we were no longer going to carrying HD, and we should sell off everything we have, but ours were still kind of renting and so we decided to keep them for rental as long as, you know, they were still renting.
Until today, that is. She just put discount sale stickers on every HD-DVD that's left. It was just over a year ago, at the big Consumer Electronics Show, that Mark Knox, a spokesman for Toshiba, was promising that they'd stand by the format in the battle with Sony's Blue-Ray system.
MARK KNOX: I will go out on a limb and make a prediction that neither myself or my brother spokespeople on the other side of the fence are going to disappear in a cloud of pixilated dust because we got fragged by the other guy. We're gonna see HD-DVD around for a very long time.
Hey, we all know a year can be a very long time in the life-cycle of some of these gadgets.
