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HD DVD Prices Slashed By Toshiba
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jan 15, 2008 11:21 AM
from the i-think-that-bell-has-rung dept.
from the i-think-that-bell-has-rung dept.
Hellburner writes "Hoping to stop the inevitable, Toshiba has slashed the price of entry-level HD DVD players to $150 — down from the previous $300. 'It's a half-empty, half-full moment for retailers, who could see a sales boost at the same time that some may be faced with price matching from holiday sales ... The theory: play up the acceptance by consumers who have already paid for HD DVD versus those who get it with something else like a gaming console, get more players out there--and dare studios to ignore those consumers. In addition to the sales cuts, Toshiba will launch major initiatives, including joint advertising campaigns with studios.'"
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Richard Greenfield, the media analyst with Pali Research, wrote that this marks the end of the format wars: "We expect HD DVD to 'die' a quick death.""
[+]
Hardware: Toshiba To Halt HD-DVD Production 494 comments
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[+]
Sony Paid Warner Bros. $400 Million to Go Blu-Ray? 487 comments
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Great... just great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Warner joins Blu-Ray. People think the battle is over. In response, HDDVD prices are slashed. Consumer's flock to HDDVD. Battle continues.
I'm really tired of this.
Re:Great... just great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially when Disney is Blu-Ray exclusive - never underestimate the number of parents buying Ratatouille for their kids.
Parent
Parents aren't early adopters (Score:5, Insightful)
Little kids aren't clamoring for better-than-DVD quality. They don't care or know the difference, and parents aren't going to fork over extra $$ for it.
Parent
Re:Parents aren't early adopters (Score:5, Funny)
Just kidding. I don't have any kids.
--- SER
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A better comparison is VHS = DVD, LaserDisc = HDDVD/BluRay. Notice how when they started making LDs, they didn't stop selling VHS?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The kids won't and don't care because they're not looking at the definition of the video, and the parents are happy because they can burn another
Re:Parents aren't early adopters (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people are just complainers. They complain about stuff, but they refuse to find ways to solve their problems, and worse, they actively ignore any suggestions which would solve their problems.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A lot of the "parents" I know would not trust their HD-DVDs or Blueray discs to their "Disney aged" kids, in the first place. Pretty much all of them back up their original DVD and give the kids the backup... Surprisingly, a lot of them are "non geek" parents. Of course, a lot of them rent the DVD, and then create a backup, too... Not that I really support that.
Fortunately Blu-ray mandates a anti-scratch coating that is really really hard to scratch. Find a bargain bin Blu-ray and try it out (total recall is a candidate).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great... just great. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Great... just great. (Score:5, Informative)
Only in North America. In some other parts of the world Disney titles (at least some of them) are HD-DVD, due to different agreements with local distributers. And HD-DVD has no region encoding.
Parent
Re:Great... just great. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a parent, that's one of the least convincing reasons to go with HD discs.
The minute I start buying kids movies on HD, I lose the ability to play those movies:
- on my laptop when on holiday
- in the car
- ripped onto my media centre
- on the upstairs SD TV
My kids don't watch a lot of TV...but the places they do watch tend to be non-standard. They don't go down to the theatre room & plan to spend a couple of hours watching a movie. That's a mom & dad thing.
Watching TV for them is more typically on the way to grandma's house, or for 20 minutes in the family room so mom can get dinner ready. Unless I invest in a whole pile of new technology, blu-ray reduces the options for my kids. Do portable Blu-Ray players even exist yet?
And to make matters worse...my kids won't even care. Oh sure, if I sit them down and force them to compare they might notice a difference, but they won't whine about having to watch the DVD version over the HD version.
For that matter, neither will I. I'm gonna pass on this format war until I have no choice whatsoever (i.e. blockbuster doesn't carry standard DVD's).
It's still possible that BOTH formats will go the way of the laser disc.
Parent
Re:Great... just great. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
On the Contrary... it's the inverse (Score:4, Insightful)
When did consumers make the move en-masse and DVD started outselling VHS? Not when the quality and content difference was there - it was there from the beginning. It was when the players got cheap!
When did the DVD+R/DVD-R/DVD-RAM war end? It wasn't when one media had innvation over the other - it was when the dual-format hardware came out!
Why did VHS beat out betamax? It wasn't cause of the Porn angle, that is an urban myth (do a Google search). The real reason? VHS media was cheaper both to acquire and to record on (consumers could record 3 hour long shows on 1 tape vs. betamax's 1 ).
Consumers don't think with their heads. They think with their WALLETS. If they see high def player A on the shelf and high def player B on the shelf, and one is 1/2 the price of the other, they don't sit around doing market analysis to see what content is available on each - they buy the cheap one. Then they buy stuff that works in the cheap one.
And if your content doesn't work in their cheaper player and they know that, it won't get bought.
Parent
Re:Great... just great. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People are on the sidelines waiting for a winner. The simple move of a studio or two to one format or the other won't decide the battle- the consumers will, and the studios will follow.
But what's really going to give the consumers the illusion that one side has already won? Sensationalist headlines and news stories similar to this one. It treats it like the battle is already over and toshiba lost. If enough news sources po
Re:Competition drives down prices! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Competition drives down prices! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Competition drives down prices! (Score:5, Funny)
Did your professor mention how comfortable the couch was?
Parent
Re:Competition drives down prices! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never heard consumers complain about price wars in the past... airlines, PCs, etc. Isn't that a big part of what capitalism is all about? While there are two competing solutions, since they have many similar features on a technical level, they're forced to compete on price. This tends to be GOOD for the consumer, at least in the short term. (In the longer term, it can be bad as lower margins can squeeze out smaller startup competitors in the field.)
That totally misses the point. We're talking *standards*, not *manufacturers*. Having multiple manufacturers who are competing for the exact same market is fantastic. But it doesn't help capitalism to have multiple standards; if anything, it fragments the market and makes competition more difficult.
Even then, IF players on the market could play either disc, then sure, competition between standards would be OK. But nobody likes hardware/disc incompatibility. Nobody likes buying a player that only gets half the movies released for it. Nobody likes having to have two damned disc players to make sure they can play what they want. And nobody likes buying a disc player whose maker loses the format war, meaning you spent hundreds of dollars for something that becomes a dinosaur in a year. Do you then go buy another disc player? Do you leave the player hooked up in your entertainment system forever even though it can only play the 5 movies you bought, or do you go re-buy those movies?
Basically, what's happening now is nobody wants to get caught up in the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray pissing contest, so a whole lot of people who otherwise would have bought a player by now are getting sick of the crap and want someone to win. That doesn't mean we want to see only one manufacturer making players; far from it. I'd like to see tons of manufacturers competing directly on the basis of a single standard. I'd like to get a better disc player than the one I have now, but I don't want to get in the middle of this crap.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is. Competition is good also in ideas. In this case Blu-Ray, which is the technically superior format, won the war. Sadly, the fact that a Microsoft funded Toshiba continues the fight just means that we will have more senseless damage to innocent bystanders and no different outcome in the end.
In this battle Toshiba is Microsoft's paid assassin, and the only thing
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why, exactly? One would think that competition in ideas and standards would be just as healthy as a competition in the products themselves.
Network Effects [wikipedia.org] prevent fair competition in the market. see also Microsoft Office.
That's the rub though, isn't it? Blu-Ray as a spec was just about sealed and ready to go, then Microsoft cobbled together a consortium at the last minute, and pushed HD-DVD because they didn't get their lock-in goodies included into the Blu-Ray spec.
Now do realize that the customer in this format war was not you or I, or any other end-user of the products. Far from it, in fact. The real customer in this little format war were the movie studios. Put in that perspective, the movie studios chose what they
Dying format. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dying format. (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is something that we won't see for at least a year--possibly longer. Something that struck me about the new BD player announcements at CES is that none of the manufacturers are lowering the prices of the entry level players (all are still around 400 bucks MSRP). Rather, they're refreshing/updating them and keeping the prices the same. The only price drops were on the higher end ones ($800 down to $650, for instance).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
HD-DVD needs to push their hybrid DVD/HD-DVD disks that they introduced a year ago. That alone would win the war if they just got out there and told consumers "hey, you can buy a DVD today and when you decide to switch to HD-DVD your HD library will already be started."
In fact, if HD-DVD got half as much advertising time as BR they woul
Re:Dying format. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
[quote]Hersteller von Abspielgeräten für das konkurrierende Blu-ray-Format erklärten derweil, sie sähen aufgrund des mittlerweile entschiedenen Konkurrenzkampfes keinen Grund, die Preise ihrer Player zu senken.[/quote]
Translated:
Meanwhile manufacturers of players for the competing format Blu-ray stated they wouldn't see the need to bring dow
Re:Dying format. (Score:4, Interesting)
And this is the best way to do it.
The Blu-Ray folks are complaining that HD-DVD forced them to release crappy players that are going to be horribly obsolete and not play *well* new Blu-Ray discs. They did this because HD-DVD players have, in their specification, everything that Blu-Ray Profile 2.0 (BD Live) is supposed to have, practically two years earlier!
And then, the HD-DVD players debuted at a price of $500.
The first Blu-Ray players in North America debuted as a price for $1000, but were basically upgraded DVD players that added Blu-Ray disc support and HD decode.
Now, you can find HD-DVD players for $150. The price of a good Blu-Ray player (at least one supporting profile 1.1, and optionally supporting upgrade to 2.0) is $400 (PS3, for varying definitions of "good" because of a lack of IR support (and thus integration with useful devices like Harmony remotes)).
I'm fairly certain if it wasn't for the push to the bottom, Blu-Ray players would take their sweet time coming down in price, and we'd still be at Blu-Ray 1.0. And double-layer Blu-Rays would be nonexistent, rather than heavily developed (which is where HD-DVD triple layers are - dual layer HD-DVDs are trivially simple since they have millions of DVDs to refine the process).
If we believe the Blu-Ray guys, then Blu-Ray wouldn't have been out until a year after it was released (what the PS3 would use, who knows).
The funny thing is, the Blu-Ray Association claimed profile 2.0 was long settled before the first player made it to market, as well (and still, the combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players have the hardware, but don't support profile 2.0).
Parent
Probably not enough to undo the damage (Score:5, Insightful)
I think more than that's needed for HD DVD to "not fail", but it still results in good value hardware hitting the market that's worth the money regardless of whether it supports a standard that may not end up going anywhere.
MSRP? (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:MSRP? (Score:5, Informative)
Co-op is paid at anywhere from 50% up to 100%, and is based on how much a retailer purchases from the manufacturer. For example, in my hardware store we buy products from Scott's (fertilizer) and accrue 6% of our purchases into co-op funds. If I run and ad, feature Scott's products, and follow their price guidelines I get reimbursed up to whatever my accrued co-op fund is.
Parent
Why not both? (Score:5, Interesting)
I really don't care who wins out or if we end up with both. I'm sick of needing to replace my movie collection every however many years. I had a crap load of vhs. I now have a library of films on dvd. Am I going to replace everything with the media du jour? No. I have too much money invested in the shiny discs I already have and I don't see those going away for a very long time. Most people I know don't even have a high def tv yet and according to the story yesterday regarding the uber def format the Japanese are working on, why should I upgraded to BR or HDDVD only to have to upgraded again to support the crazy resolutions of yet another format in 2015?
I Own a Single HD-DVD (Score:4, Interesting)
My mother bought me an HD-DVD for the holidays, assuming for some reason that I owned an HD player. Now, this is a series that I wanted in HD (Planet Earth), but I was going to wait till this annoying format war was over. Now of course, a month later, the format that she bought me turns out to be losing.
Anyone know if there will be some way to exchange formats, should HD-DVD finally die out? Buying a hybrid player seems like an awful waste for a single dvd. Anyone else have a contingency plan to play HD-DVD's that they own?
Too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially since, lets face it, you'd only care about Blu-Ray/HD-DVD in the first place if you drop $1k-2k+ on the TV itself, and another $200-1K on the stereo system.
Re:Too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
$150 is still a little pricey (Score:3, Insightful)
The best option (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh, it doesn't really matter at this point. Digital Distribution is going to end this format war a lot faster than Sony's or Toshiba's corporate posturing.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Victimizes the weak (Score:4, Interesting)
This is simply taking advantage of mom 'n pop consumers who are just out to buy a nice birthday gift or something like that and don't read consumer electronics news sites.
There's probably nothing in particular that can be done to stop it. It's simply the strong taking from the weak, where in this case the weak are the uninformed. The current moral climate in the United States seems to accept that it is perfectly OK for the strong to take from the weak as long as there's no law against it, and as long as it only involves money. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless.
I wonder how many of the Best Buys of the world will be warning customers that the price drop is a firesale of a product that many think will be orphaned, and how many will be stacking 'em up by the checkout isles and selling them as hard as they can?
Re:Victimizes the weak (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Something I discovered over a year ago (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember looking at HD-DVD burners around the same time. It was about $600 for the Blu-Ray internal drive and it was about $1200 for an external firewire HD-DVD burner. Late spring/early summer 2007 I went to look at getting an HD-DVD burner as wedding season started. I figured the price of HD-DVD burners had dropped to the point where I could make a buck by offering the same service to others still not wanting to invest a $1000 in a burner, but still needed HD-DVD work. I could purchase the blank media at staples (both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD), which is saying something because it's a rural college town, not a big city.
So I went out shopping online and found HD-DVD drives for computers, but I couldn't find a single burner. I went to a couple specialist companies that sell high end editing equipment, and they didn't have any Pro-sumer grade HD-DVD burners (they had the high end stuff). Come to find out, the low-end/consumer/prosumer grade HD-DVD burners simply didn't exist. They weren't available.
That told me something right there. When people asked what format to buy this past christmas, I still said, "I think digital downloads is going to be the way HD-content is delivered to TV's. Whether that's Apple TV/iTunes, Amazon/Cable/Tivo/Sat. I don't know. My advice is to wait. But if you have to buy one, go Blu-Ray. I can burn Blu-Ray discs, I can't even find an HD-DVD burner.
Re:Cracking (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think Bluray hasn't been cracked, take a look at the newsgroups and how many bluray rips there are. HDDVD, too, mind you.
So why are there no stories about BR being cracked? Because nobody's talking about it.
Parent
Re:As of today 75% is controlled by BluRay support (Score:3, Interesting)