Niveus, which manufactures high-end media servers for custom installers, said late Friday that it would discontinue HD DVD-based servers within the next 30 days. Blu-ray is already installed within Niveus' Summit Series Sierra, Rainier, and Denali Edition servers, and Pro Series models. Customers who have been shipped an HD DVD-based Niveus Media Server within the past 90 days are eligible for upgrade to a free Blu-ray drive, the company said.

"Incorporating Blu-ray into our offering has always been part of the plan but the demand from our customers, market trends, and recent announcements expedited our decision to come to market with Blu-ray support sooner rather than later," said Tim Cutting, chief executive and co-founder of Niveus Media, in a statement. "While we have stood behind HD DVD as a viable high-definition platform, Niveus engineers have been running Blu-ray in our testing facilities and are very impressed with the performance and integration with our servers."

Although retailers like Blockbuster, Netflix and Wal-Mart have generated headlines recently with their shift away from HD DVD and to Blu-ray. But Niveus might be the first hardware maker to announce a similar shift. However, most of the major OEMs appear to have backed the right horse.

Within the PC space, both Dell and HP have already publicly backed Blu-ray, so there's no need for either company to shift its production plans if HD DVD withers and dies. Gateway has already shipped the GM and GT series PCs with hybrid Blu-ray/HD DVD drives. The manufacturer that may need to rethink its plans is Acer (which purchased Gateway), which has shipped an HD DVD laptop.

It certainly looks like HD DVD is being routed in the marketplace. The problem for Toshiba and the other HD DVD backers is that perception can quickly become reality.