Looks like the format war's end is looming.

Even though it's widely expected that HD-DVD won't last much longer, this is the first published report I've seen that explicitly puts a timeline on HD-DVD's demise. The Hollywood Reporter is citing "reliable industry sources" that Toshiba will pull the plug on HD-DVD "sometime in the coming weeks." Here's a choice quote from one of Toshiba's execs:

But she hinted that something's in the air. "Given the market developments in the past month," she said, "Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players."
Translated, that pretty much means that Toshiba's price cutting and other efforts to reverse the trends persisting in Blu-ray's favor have failed, and they're now plotting the exit strategy. Would make sense if Toshiba's moves have been aimed towards thinning out their inventory before killing the format, with some faint hope that lower prices would be enough to keep the format afloat.

The article has numerous other interesting bits of information, like Toshiba continuing to lose money on each HD-DVD player (potentially "several hundred dollars" per player). The Hollywood Reporter is a generally reliable source for industry news, but over the course of this format war even credible news sources have published information that turned out to be wrong, or at least premature (like Financial Times' article about Paramount flipping back to Blu-ray, which has yet to happen), so anything's still possible at this point, even if in practical terms this format war is already over.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...d0bfb0c25aa58d