Tosh licks war wounds

HD WAR LOSER Toshiba has forecast massive losses, though the damage is not as severe as predicted by many.

After the Betamax v VHS-style skirmish between Toshiba's HD DVD format and Sony's Blu-ray marque was spectacularly won by the latter, pundits speculated that that Tosh might be in the hole to the tune of $1 billion.

Toshiba decided to stop making HD DVD boxes after media giant Warner Bros announced that it would no longer release films for the format.

As it turns out, the analysts were a little wide of the mark as the company predicted a loss of just $666 million today. Although a large chunk of this deficit is due to the cost of the now-defunct video format, Toshiba also said that the falling price of flash memory chips would also hurt its bottom line. µ