Toshiba on Monday said it has applied for membership in the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) and that it plans to add products that support Blu-ray to its lineup.
The move comes as Toshiba moves away from HD DVD, a format it helped pioneer and was one of its main proponents.
Toshiba plans to offer "a wide range of advanced digital products," based on Blu-ray, the company said in a statement Monday. The upcoming Blu-ray roster will include DVD players, HDTVs and laptops that support multiple storage devices, including hard disk drives (HDD), DVD, and SD Cards, the company said.
"In light of recent growth in digital devices supporting the Blu-ray format, combined with market demand from consumers and retailers alike, Toshiba has decided to join the BDA," Toshiba said in the statement.
Toshiba added that some Blu-ray products, including Blu-ray disc players and notebook PCs integrating Blu-ray drives, will be available "in the course of this year."
More product details, including launch times and pricing, are being hashed out now, Toshiba said, and more information will be available soon.
Toshiba's support of Blu-ray and its application to join the BDA comes nearly a month after Toshiba said it will hop on the Blu-ray bandwagon and discontinue selling products based on HD DVD, the rival format to Blu-ray that failed to capture market share or spur sales.
Toshiba's own HD DVD format struggled against Blu-ray, which was blacked by electronic giants like Sony and Panasonic early on and embraced by massive retailers like Wal-Mart, Netflix and Blockbuster, which stopped selling Toshiba's HD DVD discs in favor of Blu-ray. Movie studios, including Warner Bros., said they would no longer release features on Toshiba's HD DVD format and instead opted for the more popular Blu-ray discs.
