Toshiba America Consumer Products announced on Monday that will step up its marketing campaign for the HD-DVD format amid record high unit sales in the fourth quarter of the previous fiscal year, following Warner Bros.’ move to back up the Blu-Ray format.

Toshiba said that it will conduct joint advertising campaigns with studios and extended pricing strategies beginning with the second half of January, aiming to emphasize the benefits of the HD-DVD format.

The move came after the company achieved the best sales volume in the next generation DVD category with an approximately 50 percent market share in 2007, which it says it proves that this is the customer’s favorite format.

Also, Toshiba registered an 80 percent plus market share for all next generation DVD equipped notebooks for the fourth quarter of 2007, which they believe ensured the success of the HD-DVD format in the near future.

"HD DVD is the best way to watch movies in high definition," said Jodi Sally, Vice President of Marketing, Toshiba's Digital A/V Group.

"Our HD DVD players not only play back approximately 800 HD DVD titles available worldwide and deliver an entirely new level of entertainment but also enhance the picture quality to near high definition on legacy DVD titles by all studios. In short, we added high def to DVD which already is the de facto standard format created and approved by the DVD Forum that consists of more than two hundred companies."

Under the new marketing strategy, Toshiba will start selling its HD-DVD players at promotional prices, while it will advertise through television, print and online media in order to make customers aware that this format is the best choice.