Despite of the fact that Toshiba Corp. has no plans to develop and manufacture HD DVD hardware after March ’08, the company also has no plans to become part of the Blu-ray disc (BD) Association (BDA) and start making BD players.

Thanks to the fact that HD DVD emerged on the market in its final version, unlike the Blu-ray, it has been adopted by end-users a little slowly, but surely. Thanks to relatively low prices, standalone HD DVD players proved to be comparatively popular among end-users and thanks to good attach rates of movies major HD DVD backers were confident in the future of the format. However, the announcement by Time Warner-owned studios to release new movies exclusively in rivaling Blu-ray disc format caused substantial problems for HD DVD, Toshiba admitted at its press conference in Tokyo, Japan.

“From an objective, fair point of view, we were clearly in a good place until last December and January. So we were very, very surprised by Warner’s announcement. As for the Aomori factory [where HD DVD players by Toshiba are produced], nothing is final at this moment,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, president and chief executive officer of Toshiba Corp., reports Engadget web-site.

Since DVD is set to vanish into thin air in the next few years and due to the lack of HD DVD alternative Blu-ray disc will become a default high-definition home video format, it would be logical for Toshiba to adopt the format developed by Philips and Sony Corp. However, the Japanese electronics conglomerate has no plans to support the competing high-def standard in the foreseeable future, at least.

“No plans at all [to adopt Blu-ray], not at this moment,” Mr. Nishida is quoted as saying.

It is necessary to note that apart from the optical disc drive itself as well as firmware difference, virtually all Toshiba’s HD DVD players are truly similar to the yet-to-be-made-available Blu-ray profile 2.0 players. All HD DVD players feature two video decoders to enable picture-in-picture (PiP) capability, Internet connectivity as well as up to 1GB local storage. Meanwhile, Blu-ray profile 1.0 players, which are available widely, do not support any of the aforementioned features; Blu-ray profile 1.1 players sport PiP capability and 256MB storage and Blu-ray profile 2.0 players feature picture-in-picture, Internet connectivity and 1GB local storage.

As a result, Toshiba can easily migrate to Blu-ray or universal HD DVD/Blu-ray players by changing optical disc drive and loading a new firmware version. However, it looks like the absence of plans to adopt BD at the moment has more to do with Toshiba’s policy as well as BDA’s $30 Blu-ray technology licensing fee.