I read an article when I was on holidays in the Shanghai Times (I think that was the paper) saying that the HD DVD Steering Group had come to a decision on which format to go forward with for the future HD DVD technology. There was two competing parties, Toshiba/NEC and another group with Sony/Phillips/Samsung and a couple other companies. It seems they picked the Toshiba/NEC technology. It is apparently very similar to existing DVD technology, and the main reason it was chosen (actually less storage per disc than the other companies entry) is that manufacturers would be able to simply modify existing manufacturing processes to produce new players/software. Apparently, the Sony technology didn't allow this. I haven't been able to find any info on either companies website on this though. Sounds like it's at least another year away, but it's pretty exciting.
Sorry I don't know much more than that, I forgot to save the article, but I did find this link with a bit of info:
http://www.hddvd.org/hddvd/ 
