Harvey Weinstein has decided that his new studio, The Weinstein Company, will exclusively support Toshiba's High Def DVD format, HD-DVD. The announcement wraps up a big week for the DVD format wars. Since most of what actually happens in the pointless tug of war between Sony's Blu-Ray and Toshiba's HD-DVD is boring as hell, I've thus far spared you, but now that the big fat stars are picking sides, I thought it was probably time to get up to speed.

• Toshiba scored another point in the battle when they announced they'll be able to roll out their players about three months ahead of Sony's Blu-Ray machines.
• Sony, Lionsgate, and Fox, exclusive Blu-Ray supporters, announced their upcoming rollout plans for the format, with Fantastic Four, Hitch, Saw and House of Flying Daggers all set to come out in early 2006. Paramount, who have backed both Sony and Toshiba, plan to High Define Aeon Flux, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and Sahara (which, having just watched it recently, I can safely say was the Best Looking Bad Film of 2005).
• At CES (where, according our friends at Engadget, High Def DVD players are "growing on trees"), Microsoft announced that it'll ship an external HD DVD drive for the Xbox 360 sometime this year. Peter Moore said: "The new drive will offer millions of Xbox 360 owners the ability to easily enjoy HD DVD movies and will provide consumers with even more choices for experiencing high-definition content, in either physical or digital form."

What other morsels did I miss in this totally exciting and revolutionary battle on the order of VHS or Beta?

Cable network Starz! has just announced that they'll partner with Microsoft and Sony to form Vongo, a legal, pay-for-play movie download service. For a $9.99 service fee per month, Vongo users will obtain unlimited access to a rotating 1,000 film library, likely culled from Starz! current catalog. They'll be able to watch those downloads at any time on a PC or portable media device (presumably that means iPods, PSPs, etc), and will be able to download "new releases" (theatrical features will be available for download after a six month window) for $3.99 apiece. Though the service will obviously draw instant comparisons to the iTunes Music Store, which just started selling television shows for $1.99 an episode with a one day window, to VOD services like GreenCine and Movielink, and to traditional models of television-based pay-per-view, Vongo would seem to go beyond old methods of delivery in terms of its breadth of content alone. But that six month window seems terribly wide, doesn't it? Especially considering that, with the backing of Microsoft and Sony, Vongo will undoubtedly be marketed to PSP and Xbox-rocking gamers. Bill Gates is expected to expand on the deal and the concept in his CES keynote this week.