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.'"
Dying format. (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Cracking (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
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).
Re:Dying format. (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 would be in much better shape.
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.
Re:Why not both? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Great... just great. (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Competition drives down prices! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:As of today 75% is controlled by BluRay support (Score:3, Interesting)
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: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).
Re:Dying format. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Great... just great. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Competition drives down prices! (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 MS wants out of this is to make sure all disk-based formats fail and Microsoft's download formats win. If you think the DRM for Blu-Ray is problematic, just wait until you are forced to purchase a new PC with the latest version of Windows Vista or whatever virus distribution tool Microsoft creates next, every two years just to watch high-def movies.