If Ars Technica is right, I think I understand why we saw the rash of announcements last week from Netflix, Best Buy, and Wal-Mart. Toshiba's senior management could recognize the repercussions of Warner's January announcement as well as anyone, and it appears that they started looking at exit strategies back in early January. This Ars article says that Netflix and Wal-Mart knew that Toshiba was working on an exit strategy that minimized their financial losses and was as graceful as possible. They may have chosen to make their announcements to avoid having to wait longer for the format war to end - Netflix would presumably be happy to simplify their disc inventory sooner rather than later, while Wal-Mart (like all retailers) would be happy to reclaim shelf space from a soon-to-be-discontinued format as quickly as possible. And if the endless parade of reports pan out, it looks like their announcements were enough to push Toshiba into faster action.

Even though I've had an HD-DVD player since last June, I'll be happy to see this format war come to a truly definitive conclusion. The alternative (mutual market stagnation, a la DVD-Audio/SACD) isn't really appealing...

Ditto. Though I don't think Blu-ray would have come as far as it did (quality, interactivity, prices) in as short a time had it not been for HD DVD nipping at its heels. Competition has some advantages. Now for the bigger war: BD vs DVD (weaning consumers off standard def).

I've just heard on CNN that the format war is over and that Toshiba is soon to make its defeat public.
Blu Ray seems to have prevailed.
Probably now we'll see some faster movement in this area...

It may be a matter of semantics, but Toshiba has yet to make any official announcements - so far it's all rumors and leaked information from anonymous sources. Until there's a press release, it's not technically over.

Toshiba will probably announce a new line of BD players instead of HD-DVD defeat.

I believe I heard on the radio that Target, WalMart, and some other retail chains are going to sell Blue Ray DVDs exclusively. That move certainly will spell death for HD DVD, if it hasn't occurred already with Toshiba's planned anouncement. Now if only the war in Iraq would end just as swiftly...

OK, now it's technically over. They'll be slowing down player shipments immediately and ceasing player shipments entirely by the end of next month.

At least those of us who had been on the fence can move forward. Now Blu-ray hardware manufacturers have to start producing players that meet the "final" Blu-ray spec (2.0). To the best of my knowledge, the DMP-BD50 that Panasonic announced at the CES is the only one firmly on the horizon (beyond the Playstation 3).

While it will benefit the consumer having this settled, It stings having recently jumped into the HD-DVD camp. Those inexpensive HD-A2's really caught a lot of "fish". It is still a very good upconverting player, feeding my AQUOS a nice 1080i signal. I guess my impulsiveness came back to bite me on the a**!

So, any word of the next Outlaw receiver with Dolby TrueHD and other lossless audio decoding?

I'm curious to see how this will impact Oppo's plans to develop yet another upscaling machine instead of an HD one.
Probably now they'll really start to develop that universal one that I, one, am waiting for.
If I'm not wrong, Blu Ray players don't readily play old DVD discs, thus Oppo will hit the nail in the head with a machine capable of upscaling old DVD discs and playing Blu Ray discs in one unit.