By early January, everyone knew that the end was near for HD-DVD. At the annual Consumer Electronics Show, Time Warner announced that its Warner Bros. film studio would no longer support both high definition film formats and that it would go exclusively Blu-ray. Six weeks later, after a series of defections, Toshiba announced that it would no longer manufacture or market the HD-DVD format. These events were the end of a war that waged for two years, costing consumers and companies millions that they spent on a soon-to-be obsolete technology. To really understand what happened, you need to start at the beginning.
The year was 1993 and two distinct groups representing various electronics companies came together to create a successor to the CD. It would be a new format that would offer the ability to save and distribute music, as well as film and computer data. Sony led the formation of one group, while Toshiba parented several companies in another. The two groups worked individually until collaborating in 1995 to develop a standard format called DVD. Many news reports surfacing at the time highlighted how much the union of the two camps benefitted the industry by preventing a format war like that of VHS vs. Betamax in the late 70s.
Read the full article at Fast Company.