Apparently my previous predictions were way off. It's been a week now since Toshiba officially announced their withdrawal from their long-running format war with Blu-ray disc, and it still makes me sad. I'm not quite sure how movie studios, retailers, and finally Toshiba decided that having two formats was hurting market penetration of high-def media. If anything, it's being held back by the vast majority of people who don't own HDTV's or do but are perfectly happy with upscaled standard DVD's.
Head on over here for a quick summary of events leading up to HD DVD's demise. And, if you want to invest relatively-small amounts of money in a dead (but just as visually impressive as Blu-ray) format, the HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 has been dropped to $50 now, and still comes with a in-box copy of King Kong as well as five free movies via mail-in rebate. Hopefully there'll be some sweet closeout deals on movies soon.