On January 4, Warner Brothers announced that it would issue new movies only on Blu-ray in 2008 and will phase out HD DVD by May. Warner was the only Hollywood studio that had been supporting both Blu-ray and HD DVD. Read Warner's press release.

This is a development of epic proportions in the battle between the two formats, and may be sufficient to doom HD DVD. This week everyone is in Las Vegas for the mammoth Consumer Electronics Show, so I think we can expect to hear more about this very quickly. I'm very interested in Microsoft's reaction.

There is no doubt that sluggishness in sales of players and thus the adoption of one of the two hi-def standard contributed to Warner's decision. Why the industry couldn't see this coming is beyond me.

I'm happy about this and what I see as the inevitable outcome.