The high-definition format war has officially concluded with Toshiba’s announcement that it will no longer continue to develop, produce, or market HD DVD products, according to twice.com.

This decision was made due to so-called “recent changes in the market,” no doubt resulting from the announcements by Warner Bros., Best Buy, Netflix, and Wal-Mart which declared their support for Blu-ray products. Best Buy will prominently feature Blu-ray products in order to show consumers their preferred format while Netflix and Wal-Mart will cease stocking HD DVD products.

Atsutoshi Nishida, Toshiba president and CEO stated, “We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop.”

Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players to retailers and expects to be finished with HD DVD business sometime in March but still plans on providing efforts to meet HD DVD customer requirements.

Atsutoshi Nishida continued by saying, “While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality.”

However, Toshiba has not given up on the high-definition arena entirely, and will continue to develop “technologies that will drive mass market access to high-definition content” including next generation CPUs, visual processes and wireless and encryption technologies. An announcement delineating the company’s strategy in that field from here on out is forthcoming.