Panasonic, Sony, Philips, etc. all reached out to ALL the CE companies including Toshiba.
Most of them joined the effort which became Blu-Ray.
Toshiba was the hold out. They wanted to maintain their patent royalties.
It's not an accident that the disc structure and replication infrastructure is similar to the DVD. That was the plan, to keep patents intact. That is what the capacity and bandwidth parameters of HD-DVD are a modest, incremental improvement beyond DVD.
The losses Toshiba will be suffering are all self-inflicted. Greed and hubris coming home to roost.
Remember, in the days leading up to E3 2005, before the PS3 was unveiled, there were furious negotiations and in the end, Yamada convinced the Toshiba CEO to hold out.
Instead they lamely proposed HD-DVD 45 GB, hoping to lure Disney with it.
Then a couple of years later, they tried again with the 51 GB variant.
They kept harping about lower costs for disc replication yet the studios priced HD-DVD movies the same as Blu-Ray (actually Blu-Ray was often less).
They obviously subsidized these fire-sales of players but it has turned out all to be in vain.
Oh and MS enabled this bullheaded course. When Warner went format neutral, leaving only Universal as HD-DVD exclusive, that could have been the coup de grace, about a year and a half ago. But MS went into red alert mode to prop up HD-DVD.
I've forgotten your last line so can't put in back in.
