HD DVD Prices Slashed By Toshiba 414
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.'"
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Great... just great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially when Disney is Blu-Ray exclusive - never underestimate the number of parents buying Ratatouille for their kids.
$150 is still a little pricey (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dying format. (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 down costs of their players because the format war had already been decided.
Who expected otherwise?
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.
"joint advertising campaigns with studios" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Great... just great. (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 post something like that, people will think it's true, and toshiba goes down without a fighting chance- and it turns out the MEDIA fought the battle for blu-ray.
If the media announced the NEWS about it, but didn't make statements like "looks like HD-DVD is dead" then people could make their own decisions. And maybe which format has Disney would make the difference, instead of Fox news announcing which direction the lemmings should be walking.
Re:MSRP? (Score:2, Insightful)
Really? I'm pretty sure Apple does this with their iPods, Nintendo with the Wii, Microsoft with the XBox 360, Sony with the PS3, Canon with their cameras, and so on. Granted they appear to have pre-existing agreements with those retailers, but let's not pretend it's completely illegal.
Re:Competition drives down prices! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Too late... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Competition drives down prices! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Dying format. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Parents aren't early adopters (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I Still Can't Figure Out (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Great... just great. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Victimizes the weak (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I finally figured out why I don't care... (Score:2, Insightful)
Give me actual high-def - three or four megapixels. At the moment I'm walking past the demo screens and I'm having to check the labels to make sure it's actually hi-def and not just a good quality DVD.
Make me say "Wow!" and I'll pay this thing some attention.
Until then, I'm just not going to bother.
Re:Parents aren't early adopters (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Parents aren't early adopters (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh wait -- yeah they do.
Re:Great... just great. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Parents aren't early adopters (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 disk for under a buck, if the backup gets fucked up enough to not play--which it inevitably does.
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.
Re:Parents aren't early adopters (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?
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.
Re:Dying format. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Competition drives down prices! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 believe to be the best deal, and the system I described worked exactly as expected. Studios chose what best suited their needs. We as the typical home viewers had little-to-no input into the deal because we weren't the target clients.
I think Microsoft/Toshiba got confused about who their real clients were as well. In their haste to rig the system in their favor, they thought that all they had to do was please the home viewer, and they'd be set... Sony knew differently after their Betamax experience, and went after the studios. The only part where we as viewers were involved included Sony's Blu-Ray-as-part-of-PS3, the marketing blitzes that purported to show widespread viewer support, and a lot of stuff behind-the-scenes we'll probably never know about. Of course, there was also the zealotry machines that each side fired up, by generating buzz about their respective products and letting those newly-minted fanboys (or at least ideologues) do the rest... and yes, both sides had them. In short, those who were passionate about either format were being used as tools, IMHO (both formats have DRM, both formats hold --roughly-- the same amount of info per-disk, etc). On a technical level, Blu-Ray holds a slight edge, but otherwise the average home user isn't going to know or care about one over the other, save for whatever money they've invested in the equipment.
If Microsoft put a HD-DVD player into the Xbox 360 as standard, and the HD-DVD consortium generated a shedload more marketing noise, things may have been different. But, MSFT already had Toshiba to do the dirty work for them, and the Xboxes are unprofitable enough as it is without adding the further cost of a full-on HD-DVD player to each unit.
~~
As per MSFT Office, the files are a standard in the business sense (though PDF is almost as prevalent nowadays), but not in any real technical sense. It's just another ordinary proprietary not-so-well-documented binary file set. The whole thing we saw during the '90s was less of a format war than it was a war of applications.
We're only beginning to see a rise towards a real document standard now - which is why MSFT is trying its level best to fight off ODF and replace it with their particular munge-up called OOXML (which IMHO is nothing more than a barely concealed software patent trap). Once the dust settles there, MS Office is liable to be the loser in either case, unless MSFT suddenly starts dropping the suite price to $50 USD a pop.
Re:Something I discovered over a year ago (Score:3, Insightful)