Can Toshiba Drop the HD DVD Format?

According to Reuters, Toshiba said it aims to ship a total of 500,000 HD DVD players and recorders worldwide in the next 7 months.

U.S. and Japan. We plan to ship another 300,000 by the end of the year," Yoshihide Fujii, the head of Toshiba's digital consumer business, told Reuters in an interview on Saturday. Toshiba believes it can ship 200,000 units in the first quarter of 2007.

HD DVD vs Blu-ray war and if studios are dropping the format, Toshiba could probably do so as well.

We had information last week that blue laser diode manufacturers will not be able to support the growth of the market until 2007. If there is a real shortage in the blue laser diodes of the next 6 months, it is unclear, according to the article, if Toshiba will still be able to keep up with the demand. On the other hand, analysts predict that it is going to be a slow start for both new high definition technologies. That would mean that the shortage would not be a problem for Toshiba.

But he said such co-existence between Blu-ray and HD-DVD could only continue as long as film studios continued to supply their films on both formats.

The Toshiba leader also said that he fully understands that the studios have the key.  As long as the big movie studios continued to support HD-DVD, Toshiba would keep aggressively promoting the standard, Fujii said.

It is the first time that Toshiba is taking about what would be the reason that would make them stop pushing the HD DVD format. We saw in the last few weeks that Hollywood studios are going more and more with the Blu-ray format. Even though there is more titles available right now in the HD DVD format, only Universal is currently only supporting HD DVD.

Source: Reuters