So with news that Japan is shelving the HD-DVD format from stores entirely, an interesting bit of news in the post portem of the high def wars, around the question — did Sony pay off Toshiba to end the war?  Well, CmdrTaco is posing that question over at Slashdot, anyway, thanks to a small piece of business information that likely slid under the radar of most interested parties about 3 days ago, courtesy of Reuters.

That news was that Sony was selling off some of its microchip production plants, which produce technology and chips critical for the Cell processor and RSX chips, both of which are part of the PS3. It is in the process of selling these plants to Toshiba for around $900 million dollars.

Now, a caveat.

As with most things on this blog, I am supremely unqualified to make any further judgements and opinions on this particular matter.

But now that its out of the way, I think there are some interesting questions that fall out of this otherwise irrelevant bit of information (because at the end of the day, the high definition wars are over).

Namely, that it would only be a pay off if the $900M price tag is hugely discounted AND/OR the technology therein is so valuable that the cost to create such technology for what Toshiba intends to do with it, is far in excess of it

Or … that by selling off this portion of this business to Toshiba, its, in effect, allowing Toshiba to profit from the increased sales of the PS3 product, thereby acting as a hedge against the losses of the HD-DVD format. This is somewhat legitimate given that the PS3 is projected to have huge sales / potentially rule the roost over the next decade or so, only strengthened by the fact that — from some people’s perspective — for the price you pay, its either a blu-ray player where you get an awesome console system attached, or, an awesome console system with a free blu-ray player attached.

Irrespective of whether Sony or did not hasten HD-DVD’s demise (and it seems like there were a whole lot of things that did), at the end of the day, is kind of irrelevant. Many stakeholders were waiting for someone to emerge a winner, and for most lay-folk, I don’t think it really mattered which — only that this format war finish as quickly (or as slowly) as it finally did.

Looks like Wal-Mart dropping the HD-DVD format in favour of Blu-Ray was eerily prescient of what was to come only hours later.  In fact, the New York Times reported that Wal-Mart’s support for the Blu-Ray format *was* HD-DVD’s demise yesterday.

Well, its confirmed now.  Reuters is reporting that Toshiba is, in fact, dropping the HD-DVD format entirely, writing off billions of yen (and millions of dollars) in R&D and production costs.

While this will have ramifications in all kinds of areas for months to come (everyone benefits from a single standard, what will happen to all of those HD-DVD units that are unsold, the legality of pulling out with respect to Toshiba’s HD-DVD partners, and so on, yackity yack), I’m particularly curious as to how Microsoft will handle this particular bit of news, as its Xbox 360 currently only supports the HD-DVD format (if you wanted to play movies, and had that extra bit of hardware).  There have been rumours that Blu-Ray support might come in the future; I suppose that future’s going to come a fair bit quicker with Toshiba’s exit from the High Definition wars.