It’s official: HD DVD will go the way of Betamax, the Edsel and every TV series that has starred Ted McGinley.

After a month of speculation over the technology’s future, most of it negative, the chief of Toshiba Corp., Atsutoshi Nishida, announced early Tuesday that his company would discontinue making HD DVD equipment immediately and withdraw from all production and marketing by March.

He called the decision “heartbreaking,” during a news conference in Tokyo, but necessary following the move early last month by movie maker Warner Bros. to court rival Blu-ray technology. Warner Bros, owned by Time Warner Inc., was a huge and influential partner in the HD DVD coalition.

The capper though came soon after when major retailers Best Buy and Wal-Mart also bolted for Blu-ray. Not having a toehold in the American consumer electronics market with the nation’s two biggest retailers assisting probably would have quashed HD DVD’s chances of success regardless of movie studio support.

And so ends a technology battle widely compared to the Betamax-VHS showdown in video tape almost three decades ago. In both instances, the losing side appeared to have a marketing edge at the outset. Betamax developer Sony Corp. had much more market influence than VHS’s developer, JVC. Likewise, HD DVD was expected to flourish once Microsoft started selling the drives as peripherals to its best-selling Xbox 360 video game console.

(Rumors abound that Microsoft now will unveil an Xbox 360 with Blu-ray capability sometime this spring.)

The end of this latest “format war” however does not bring a clear victory for Blu-ray, now apparently the leading technology in high-density optical disc storage for high-definition media. One major dig against Blu-ray has been price; its consumer hardware has cost almost twice that of HD DVD players. For a long time, the least expensive Blu-ray player has been Sony’s PlayStation 3 game console, at $499.

Still in development are two other high-density optical storage formats: Versatile Multilayer Disc, or HD VMD, and a variation of HD DVD made in China called CH DVD. One or both may get a boost from former HD DVD allies if Blu-ray’s prices do not come down.

HD DVD was born in 2002, after Toshiba, originally a member of the Blu-ray coalition, disagreed with the choice of technology and broke away with NEC Corp. to develop its own format. HD DVD and Blu-ray both use blue-violet lasers to “burn” the storage media, but Blu-ray has slightly faster data transfer, and the discs have about a third more storage.