well toshiba still wins, they still get dvd royalties, until digital distribution takes over in the next decade.

Haha, well technically I guess you could say Toshiba won... short term anyway.  They still get DVD royalties, and DVD sales have actually gone up over the last couple years, so I suppose they should be pretty happy.  Of course, since their first venture into an upgraded format has failed, it's unlikely that they will be the ones who actually do come up with a valid replacement for the DVD format (unless they are already working on it).  

All this talk of win is kind of silly. Neither format will ever really win. Blu-ray will be more successful but it will never even come close to competing with DVD so could hardly be called a win. The general public just don't care about HD video. The jump from dvd quality just doesn't justify the jump in price. And that's all there really is to it. Better picture and better sound but for much more price (not to mention price of buying a HD tv). With video to dvd not only did you get a massive jump in picture and sound quality (much more than that from dvd to video) you also didn't have to do with rewinding and forwarding and the tape wearing off after watching a few times. HD has no hope. Only a very small proportion of people would pay £20 per movie for slightly increased picture quality and sound quality when dvds are selling for £5. DVD is here to stay and blu ray and HD DVD ain't got much hope. there are too many dvd players out there for either HD disc format to ever be truly successful

Someday, someone will win the format war. It will be the first company to get HD discs and players to the same price as their DVD counterparts. Then people will have no reason not to upgrade.

Until that point, I don't see much happening in this war outside of bravado and claims of grandeur from both camps.

a few points

a) toshiba is winning wayyyy over sony...if toshiba didn't spend the money on hd-dvd, then blu-ray would have a much better chance, as all studios would use blu-ray...all the movies that are on hd-dvd right now give royalties to toshiba, whether they sell on dvd or hd-dvd...if those movies were on blu-ray instead, toshiba wouldn't see a dime for the blu-ray versions of them...and if blu-ray didn't have the competition and the split, causing consumers to wait to see which side wins before taking a plunge, then blu-ray would win much faster, thus leading to less royalties on dvds for toshiba...so toshiba has to play this game to protect themselves

b) i prefer hd-dvd because they sell many movies in dual-format...i don't wanna spend $30 on a dvd that i can only play on my one hd-dvd player in one room in my house...can't watch it on laptop, portable dvd player on vacation, my friend's house, etc etc etc

c) dvds caught on because they offered different FEATURES than vhs: chapters, no-rewind, languages/subtitles, commentaries, etc etc...same with mp3s over cds...consumers don't care much about QUALITY, they care about features...mp3s have worse quality than cds but offer more features....so will be tough for hd-dvd to catch on...consumers just won't pay much of an extra cost just for the quality increase...even hdtvs have been slow to penetrate the market

d) u can get hd-dvd players for $200 now and walmart/bestbuy sold some last month for $100 on a friday...when they can sell large quantities at $100, they will see a huge increase in sales...blu-ray's laser costs too much for blu-ray to compete with this price in the near future...so hd-dvd had the advantage even if there are currently more blu-ray players...once buying an hd-dvd player is only $50 or so more than a regular dvd player, a good % of consumers with hdtvs that buy a dvd player will go ahead and get an hd-dvd player

My name is elprincipe and I endorse this message.

This is such a sad race, DVD for the win

One of the formats need to win now, after this christmas season I suspect consumers will have discovered that an upscaling dvd-player with HDMI is good enuff and leave the HD formats well alone.For me as a movie buff that would be terrible.