Toshiba's HD DVD Ups and Downs

Ever get the feeling someone's giving you mixed messages? Toshiba's been kind of like that the last few days. On Monday the company was on top of the world, with the North American HD DVD Promotional Group proclaiming that HD DVD players accounted for 60% of the North American set-top player market for high-definition DVD players and that more than 75,000 HD DVD movies had sold in the last week of May alone. Also, Toshiba's budget-priced HD-A2 became the top-selling high-definition player to date.

(I won't get into all the unspoken caveats raised by the press release -- and there are many -- but I'm always wary when these kind of hardware claims are made, especially when they're so specific. Note that the release only mentions standalone high-def players, with no mention of the PS3 -- which, it turns out, is quite a significant factor. What about players found in computers and on the Xbox?)

Huzzahs all around at the Toshiba offices, I'm sure. But the very next day, the word out of Tokyo was that the company had to lower its sales target for HD DVD players and recorders from 1.8 million to 1 million units by the end of this year. Why? According to Yoshihide Fujii, head of Toshiba's digital consumer business, "Sales in the U.S. have been slower than expected." (Hm. Suddenly those caveats might bear more scrutiny.)

Toshiba's current plan to outfit all of their laptops with HD DVD drives might tip the scales, though the PS3 has had something of a head start and surely Sony isn't sitting idly by. But I wonder if, deep within Toshiba's head office, somebody is asking if this format war was really worth it.