Everything indicates, through gossip and traces, that next week, Toshiba will anounce officially that gives up and stops fighting in the attempt to impose his HD-DVD format in the market of high definition disks.
The Blu-ray consortium led by Sony wins this “format war”: a sweet revenge of his defeat in the 80’s during the tape format war VHS vs. BetaMAX.

The readers of my blog have been continuosly informed about the evolution of this format war and my vision about this:

• On my Christmas message of Dec 24th 2007, I already advanced that 2008 would be the year of the end of the HD-DVD format: http://www.cine.com/jordialonso/?p=897
• January 4th 2008 Warner Bros gives exclusive support to Blu-ray: http://www.cine.com/jordialonso/?p=909
• January 10th 2008 Albert Penello from Microsoft tells between lines during CES that XBox would give support to Blu-ray if this is the winning format of HD, despite Microsoft belongs to the HD-DVD consortium:
  http://www.cine.com/jordialonso/?p=913
• February 13th 2008 Netflix announces will purchase only Blu-ray discs to offer HD rentals to customers: http://www.cine.com/jordialonso/?p=968

Now some questions:
What is going to happen with those having purchased an HD-DVD player or a laptop with HD-DVD?
And those who already have movies purchased in this format?
That, not to talk about production companies like DreamWorks/Universal which have made huge quantities of copies of “Transformers” and other movies in HD-DVD only, or those electronic retailers and distributors of Toshiba and other companies members of the consortium, which have stocked HD-DVD players … get ready to see bargains on HD-DVD discs and players starting tomorrow… it’s up to you to purchase them or not, but do not say you were not informed …

Next wars:
internet download formats. Contenders: Windows Media, Flash Video and DivX.
3D format. Contenders: likely 3Dbluray, some from Philips, another yet to appear.