What does the death of HD-DVD mean for the rest of us?

Tuesday's announcement from Toshiba that they will cease manufacturing and selling HD-DVD players has brought to an end of the High Definition disc format war and made Blu-Ray the winner. Now that Toshiba has conceded defeat all that is left is to hire an army of lawyers for the class action lawsuit from the 1.3 million of buyers of HD-DVD players.

The winner by far is Sony who will forever will make money from licencing fees when ever somebody buys a blu-ray player or content on blu-ray.

On the surface it appears that consumers win because the choice becomes a lot easier but the problem for the consumer is that blu-ray is more expensive and because it's the only choice now consumers will be paying the premium price forever.

It may eventually be that lower tier electronics manufacturers will end up making so many blu-ray players and selling them at mass sellers like Wal-Mart that it will force prices down like when companies like Apex Digital brought the price of a DVD player to under 200 dollars.

The format war is over and we are still treating the wounded, and Toshiba is carrying way their dead.