Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida said today his company won't hit the rewind button on talks with a Sony led group to find a mutually agreeable format for next-generation DVDs. "There's no plan for (resuming) such talks at this moment" with Sony, he said according to the Associated Press. Toshiba supports the HD DVD system, while Sony is the exponent of the Blu-ray format.

Nishida's remarks likely won't play well with the Blu-ray crowd. "We are hopeful that we can still find a resolution," a Blu-ray Disc Association spokesman said earlier today. "We still have time to find a way to avoid having two formats go to market, which isn't good for consumers or us." Certainly not good for the businesses--should each decide to pursue their own disks, disk players and separate content, the costs could run to billions. As for the consumer, one analyst reckoned baffled shoppers most likely stick to "normal" DVDs until a single format is established.

Read more from Forbes.

But is it really true that the war isn't good for consumers? Yes it could be little bit awkward first, but would it be different than this DVD-R against DVD+R war? Is it really a bad thing to consumers that there is two rival formats pushing new technology as fast as possible to the market with lower price (than the rival format products)? Is there any possibility to have multi-format drives that could Write/Read both - Blu-ray and HD DVD? Yes, those multi-format drives would obviously cost more but hey, look at the DVDRW writers these days - most of them are multi-format drives!