Ending of the format war
In January 2008, a day before CES 2008, Warner Brothers, the only major studio who was releasing movies in both HDDVD and BluRay format, announced they will only release in BluRay after May 2008. This effectively included other studios which come under the Warner umbrella, i.e New Line Cinema and HBO as well. This led to a chain reaction in the industry, including major US retailers such as WalMart dropping HDDVD in their stores. A major European retailer Woolworths dropped HDDVD from their inventory. Netflix, the major online DVD rental site said they will no longer stock new HDDVDs. Following these new developments, on 19 February 2008, Toshiba announced it was ending production of HD DVD devices , allowing Blu-ray Disc to become the industry standard for high-density optical disks. Universal Studios, the sole major movie studio to back HD-DVD since inception, shortly after Toshiba’s announcement said, “while Universal values the close partnership we have shared with Toshiba, it is time to turn our focus to releasing new and catalog titles on Blu-ray.”Paramount Studios, which started releasing movies only in HDDVD format during late 2007, also said they will start releasing in BluRay. With this, all major Hollywood studios are now supporting BluRay.”