Mr Akiyo Ozaka, president of Toshiba America Consumer Products, told a briefing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that HD DVD 'has not lost'.

Mr Ozaka, however, was at a loss to say what Toshiba planned to do next after the decision by Time Warner's Warner Bros, one of the world's largest film studios, to embrace Blu-ray, an optical disk format for storing high-definition video backed by Toshiba rival Sony.

Toshiba's defiant remarks were the latest salvo in a long-running battle over which format would dominate the next generation of technology for delivering high-definition movies to consumers.

The winner is expected to inherit a multibillion-dollar industry, although consumers so far have been confused by the standards war. Some analysts say they have also failed to see the attraction of high-definition.

The rivalry has been compared to the video-cassette-recorder format war of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which ultimately Sony's Betamax lost and JVC's VHS won.

Toshiba, the main backer of the HD DVD format, defended the technology on Sunday after the HD DVD consortium, a group of companies of which it is a part, cancelled plans to hold its own press conference at the Las Vegas trade show, the industry's largest United States gathering.

'We were very disappointed with Warner Bros' announcement,' Mr Ozaka said. 'Sales of HD DVD were very good last year, especially in October to December.'

Mr Ozaka said North American sales of HD DVD players, including movie drives in Microsoft's Xbox 360, totalled one million in the last year, helped by downloads of high-definition video onto personal computers equipped with the technology.

The technology debuted broadly in the US in 2006 but has not become a big hit with consumers yet.

Mr Ozaka declined to comment on Toshiba's next steps, which he said Toshiba's HD DVD partners would have to discuss.

Toshiba marketing executive Jodi Sally told the audience that HD DVD remained the best technology, but she acknowledged that the Warner Bros announcement on Friday took her by surprise.

'It's difficult for me to believe when all the pundits declare that HD DVD is dead,' Ms Sally said. 'Clearly, the events of the last few days have led many of you to that conclusion.'

'We have been declared dead before,' she added. 'The reality is we ended 2007 with a majority of the year-to-date market share.'

REUTERS