"We concluded that a swift decision would be best," Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida told reporters at his company's Tokyo offices.
The move would make Blu-ray — backed by Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic brand products, and five major Hollywood movie studios — the winner in the battle over high-definition DVD formatting that began several years ago.
Nishida said last month's decision by Warner Bros. Entertainment to release movie discs only in the Blu-ray format made the move inevitable.
"That had tremendous impact," he said. "If we had continued, that would have created problems for consumers, and we simply had no chance to win."
Warner joined Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Co. and News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox in that move.
1 million own defunct players
Nishida said his company had confidence in HD DVD as a technology and tried to assure the estimated 1 million people, including some 600,000 people in North America, who already bought HD DVD machines by promising that Toshiba will continue to provide product support for the technology.
Both HD DVD and Blu-ray deliver crisp, clear high-definition pictures and sound, which are more detailed and vivid than existing video technology. They are incompatible with each other, and neither plays on older DVD players. But both formats play on high-definition TVs.
HD DVD was touted as being cheaper because it was more similar to previous video technology, while Blu-ray boasted bigger recording capacity.
Only one video format has been expected to emerge as the victor, much like VHS trumped Sony's Betamax in the video format battle of the 1980s.
Nishida said it was still uncertain what will happen with the Hollywood studios that signed to produce HD DVD movies, including Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation.
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