It’s official: Toshiba’s president has just made a statement about the company’s “discontinuation of HD DVD businesses.” RIP HD DVD, March 31, 2006 - February 19, 2008.

We can all finally rest in peace knowing the Blu-ray has won the format war (hence the big, shiny, blue logo to the right).

In a last-gasp effort, Toshiba did announce that it will “continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives.” However, with a lack of HD DVD movies, we don’t see that position getting much better.

See the press release here.

It looks like this one is all but over. In another major blow to HD DVD, Netflix announced today that by the end of the year they plan to phase out their stock of HD DVD and go exclusively Blu-ray.

The decision comes after most of the major Hollywood studios dropped HD DVD and decided to only use Blu-ray for upcoming high-definition DVDs.

“The prolonged period of competition between two formats has prevented clear communication to the consumer regarding the richness of the high-def experience versus standard definition,” said Ted Sarandos, chief content officer for Netflix.

He also added, “We’re now at the point where the industry can pursue the migration to a single format, bring clarity to the consumer and accelerate the adoption of high-def. Going forward, we expect that all of the studios will publish in the Blu-ray format and that the price points of high-def DVD players will come down significantly. These factors could well lead to another decade of disc-based movie watching as the consumer’s preferred means.”

Netflix seems to believe that Blu-ray has won, and this has us completely convinced. With such a major company standing behind Blu-ray, expect HD DVD to die out soon.

Bill Watkins, CEO of hard drive giant Seagate, has said that Blu-ray’s apparent victory over HD DVD doesn’t mean much. His reasoning? Downloads are the future.

Said Watkins, “Blu-Ray versus HD: Well maybe Blu-Ray won, but it’s a meaningless victory. … Because guess what: People are going to download everything.”

Of course, the words are coming from the mouth of the beast himself. It sure would be profitable for huge downloads to replace Blu-ray when it means bigger hard drive sales. And we’re talking much bigger!

Today’s bandwidth is not even close to being able to handle such downloads, but who knows what will come with time. Most likely, Watkins’ prediction will come true. Most analysts and tech watchers agree that movie downloads are in the future.

It seems that Sony has just about put a nail in Toshiba’s HD DVD coffin with their latest announcement. The tech giant has been able to shrink the Blu-ray module to a more compact size, meaning that Blu-ray drives will be getting smaller and, more importantly, cheaper.

The new laser unit is a measly 3mm thick. Sony thinks that the device will make it to 9.5mm laptop drives by the end of the year.

A few more features of the new laser - it can handle dual-layer discs as well as those with organic dye in the recording layers. This is good news as organic discs can be made on current DVD production lines, which probably means cheaper prices.

It’s a good thing that the format war is finally winding down. Both formats are great, and have their separate strengths, but it’s good to finally know which player to buy.