Warner Entertainment decided today to go exclusively blu-ray disk and drop the HD DVD format altogether.   They’d been working with both standards, and this has sent a shock wave – maybe a deadly shock – to the HD DVD standard pioneered by Toshiba.   Blu-ray is the standard developed largely by SONY.

And so we’ve got huge CES News even before the conference starts tomorrow (Sat for Press, Sun for Gates Keynote).   The HD-DVD consotium has cancelled it’s press briefing at CES and is probably scrambling to figure out what hit them.    Rumors suggest it was a 500 million payoff to Warner that got them to “see the light” of the blu-ray format, though it was a superior format by most technical standards.   Unfortunately the players tend to cost more, thus we may see better quality at higher costs. 

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