Digital Journal cites Japan"s Nikkei business daily, which reportedly said Toshiba is looking at a $986 million loss in its failed HD-DVD business. To give that figure more impact, we"ll refer to that amount as 100 billion yen.

If you"ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you may have missed the crumbling sound followed by a distinct "thunk" that effectively ended the HD-DVD business, much to the joy of Blu-backers Sony.

Digital Journal"s David Silverberg wrote, "The death of HD-DVD is also expected to post a full-year profit of 250 billion yen ($2.5 billion US), falling short of its outlook."

Toshiba apparently isn"t confirming or denying the figures.

I may have said this before on these pages, but I simply can"t wait until all physical media dies. Yes, even Blu-ray. I know there are some people out there who want bookshelves full of boxes for games and movies. I suppose I can understand how people might like to have something that they can point at and say "This is mine!" But to me, being able to say that is not really worth much.

For the next generation of consoles, put everything on a hard drive, give me a great, easy-to-navigate menu system to access all of my video, music and gaming content, and that will finally seem like a next generation console rig. Or I suppose I could fulfill this digital fantasy at my PC, which offers pretty much all of that stuff, minus the super-cozy La-Z-Boy.

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