So Toshiba has finally done what we’d long expected. The axe has fallen on the crestfallen face of HD DVD. Shame, as I actually quite liked it. At the first HD DVD event I went to, the format sounded exciting, even if the alarm bells were ringing that only Toshiba was really pushing it.

I remember attending the March 2006 launch of the Qosmio G30 in London, the first notebook to offer HD DVD drives. The lack of support from other parties meant an air of uncertainty was palpable among the gathered tech press even then.

It might be routine to draw parallels between HD DVD and Betamax, but just as stereotypes are there for a reason, so is such a comparison. Betamax was better technically. Whether HD DVD was remains a period of debate. But Tosh claimed at the time that the discs were cheaper to produce, while the manufacturing process didn’t require mass factory re-tooling and could be produced on only slightly-modified DVD production lines.

But there is a tinge of sadness within us. For one thing, HD DVD is a far better name for Joe Public to get his head around.  What does Blu-ray mean to most?

Blu-ray's disadvantages

Trouble was also predicted over Blu-ray’s disc structure. The data layer is much closer to the surface than on a DVD, and it was at first more vulnerable to scratches until companies such as TDK came up with new coatings.  Whereas HD DVD and the time-proven DVD have two 0.6mm-thick sides either side of the data layer, Blu-ray data is stored behind a 0.1mm-thick protective layer.

But Blu-ray could store more data – 25GB as opposed to 15GB on a single layer disc. It also had a proliferation of support from big industry names and studios which never looked like letting up. And when Warner Bros jumped ship, well, it was only a matter of time before those decisions harpooned the format. Today Tosh has cited “recent major changes in the market” for standing it down, but it can only be its own fault if it didn’t see them coming.

You know, we can’t help but think back to the early days of the 'format war' and the cost-to-produce advantage of HD DVD. Ever since the last remnants of hope for unification between HD DVD and Blu-ray evaporated, that has always been one of Toshiba’s key preachings about the format.

Quite why it couldn’t take advantage of it will be something for Toshiba to pick over time and time again. But even if it had managed to get more players out there, the groundswell of support riding on the wave of studio decisions and the PlayStation 3 would probably still have done for it.

One more thought - with Blu-ray being perhaps the last mass-market storage format before the age of video downloads, has Toshiba presided over the last great technology format failure?