A year ago today, on February 19, 2008, Toshiba officially withdrew from the high-def DVD format war. Their announcement was inevitable, and came after many weeks of bad news from various companies like Warner, Netflix, Walmart and Best Buy ending their support for the HD DVD format. Toshiba had spent many, many, hundreds of millions of dollars developing and marketing HD DVD technology, and many partners had put in their share of time and money as well. But in the end, there was just too much negative momentum to fight back.

Toshiba moved on to continue advancing technologies they were already involved with such as flash memory, hard drives, HDTVs, laptops, and their work on the Cell processor. Last year, they came out with a super duper image enhancement technology for standard DVDs, and have more recently demonstrated Cell processor applications for more of that image enhancing for HDTVs and computers. But neither Toshiba or Microsoft have announced any plans for doing anything with Blu-ray.

I’m sure many of you who were deeply involved with format war battles can remember all of those days and weeks very well. (more…)