Toshiba has made one more step in its effort to promote the HD-DVD format. Earlier this week, Toshiba has slashed the price of HD-DVD players in US and today announced a similar move in Europe.

At a briefing in Hamburg on the upcoming CeBIT computing show in March, Sascha Lange, marketing chief of Toshiba Germany, announced the price cuts for HD-DVD.

Sasha said the German price of Toshiba's base model in Europe, the HD-EP30 player, would be reduced to just below 200 euros (292 dollars) including 19-per-cent German sales tax. The same model is offered in the United States at 199 dollars plus tax.

He said the company had needed a couple of weeks to analyse its position after the Warner defection to the rival technology, Blu-ray.

"We are still convinced this is best product at the most reasonable price for the end user," Lange said. He said 200,000 of the players had been sold so far in Europe.

Toshiba would in future stress a feature of HD-DVD which was not available on Blu-ray players, an internet connection. "It creates huge opportunities," he said. "We can use it to run a video stream from an internet provider."

He demonstrated how this could be used for broadcasting over the internet, and added that the feature was already being used by owners.

During December 2007, the Blu-Ray Disc Association said that, according to industry sales data, Blu-Ray movie disc sales had topped 1 million units in Europe.

As Blu-Ray Disc Association noted 1 million units represent 73 percent of all HD movie discs sold, which means that the HD-DVD format is lagging far behind with only 27 percent. In addition, the Blu-Ray Disc Association said that when counting Blu-Ray gaming discs the total number produced for sale in Europe exceeded 21 million units.

The sales data were provided by an European research company, Media Control Gfk International.