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Comments: 507 + - Hardware: HD DVD Player Sales Grind To a Halt on Friday January 25 2008, @01:07PM
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kdawson
on Friday January 25 2008, @01:07PM
from the it-was-that-bunker-video-did-it dept.
from the it-was-that-bunker-video-did-it dept.
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Lucas123 writes "While the news may fall under the 'Duh' category, it's still relatively shocking how quickly the death knell for HD DVD player sales came on after Warner Bros. announced they were dropping dual hi-def DVD format support in order to back only Blu-ray. According to a Computerworld story, the week after Warner's announcement, sales of HD DVD players dropped to 1,758, down from 14,558 players the week before. In contrast, consumers bought 21,770 Blu-ray Disc players, up from 15,257 the previous week."
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"blue ray player" totals (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, of course the loss of another studio from HD DVD to Blue Ray likely didn't hurt sales of stand-alone blue ray players, either.
Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:5, Interesting)
If you count the PS3s, then you also increase the denominator when determining the ratio of players to media purchases, the attach rate.
I think the only honest way to report on blu-ray is to include PS3s and accept a lower attach rate (if there is one). Frankly, most blu-ray players are PS3s, and it's simply an obvious selection for those who aren't interested in video games, so excluding it is insane.
I know of several PS3 owners. Some of them only have the free blu-rays. Fair enough. None of them are unaware of the HD disc abilities, but some just don't watch movies. The statistics reflect this reality, so I see no reason to adjust things strangely.
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:4, Insightful)
I know of several PS3 owners. Some of them only have the free blu-rays. Fair enough. None of them are unaware of the HD disc abilities, but some just don't watch movies. The statistics reflect this reality, so I see no reason to adjust things strangely.
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:5, Interesting)
I generally agree, but there might be more illuminating ways to break it down. There are PS3's that are sold packaged with movies. An 'attach rate' that counts those but not PS3s sold with game packages might be interesting. Also interesting might be the 'attach rate' counting sales of the PS3 Blu-Ray remote control, which while not required is probably a high-priority item for people who bought the PS3 largely to play media.
But in the end, I'm not sure the immediate attach rate matters much. A lower attach rate means higher opportunity, since I suspect most PS3 owners will buy at least one Blu-Ray movie just to see what all the fuss is about and the existing attach rate is less than 1.0.
And with Sony selling more PS3s per quarter than HD DVD players have ever been built (is that statistic still valid?) the sales of standalone players hardly matters anymore.
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Re:I bought a PS3, and only for HD movies -nt (Score:5, Interesting)
I wanted a Blu-Ray player, and the PS3 was only $80 more than a pure player, and it got good ratings on the quality of movie playback. I figured the extra $80 was worth getting a game console and media center thrown in. Seems like good economic sense to me.
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Re:I bought a PS3, and only for HD movies -nt (Score:5, Insightful)
I would have liked to see if these numbers were just for the US. What about worldwide where these exclusive deals don't matter?
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure there are links out there to some blog, but who knows if those are any more reputable.
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:5, Interesting)
The HD-DVD campaign failed as soon as it became evident the PS3 was not going to flop, at least that's my view of the situation. When the PS3 looked doomed and 600$, it wasn't hard to believe that the HD0DVD camp would prevail.
But how do you compete with the PS3? It's not that expensive next to a great TV and movie collection, and it does all that media stuff + is a future proof blu-ray player. Almost unfair. I wonder why the 360 didn't come out with built in HD-DVD? I beleive it HD-DVD would have dominated had that been the case.
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:5, Interesting)
HD-DVD will be the RCA SelectaVision of the high definition DVD-like disk era. Remember those? Flimsy 12" disks encased in a plastic carrier and read by a stylus, they'd fall apart after a few plays. This allowed Pioneer to own the videodisc market with LaserDisc.
Heh, Sony has gotten its revenge for Betamax.
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:5, Insightful)
Eh, the gaming market is a very interesting animal. The short product life-cycles, combined with the limited competition, large costs, and proprietary nature of the products, plus the added confusion of customer and developer loyalties and tastes makes it very hard to make any accurate predictions.
Just as a quick example take a look at what's happened to Nintendo over the years, particularly the last two generations of consoles. Nintendo went from the top contender with the SNES, dropped to second with the N64, and then trailed a distant third with the Gamecube, only to make a surprise comeback with the Wii. Prior to it's launch no one was really certain how the Wii would do, and in fact many of the top analysts were predicting that it might be the system that finally killed Nintendo. Obviously looking at just the raw specs for the system it doesn't look like much of a contender when put up against the likes of the 360 and PS3. But there's more to it of course then raw specs, as the Wii's surprise success has shown.
As for the developer relations MS earned with the 360, I don't know. It definitely won't hurt them I think, but time will tell if the sacrifices they made rushing the 360 to market (most obvious seems to be the ridiculous 30% defect rate) was worth it or not. It may turn out that could have gotten the same result by simply bribing developers, but then again, maybe not. One things for certain, the choices that Sony made up till this point definitely don't seem to be working in their favor, but of course they still have plenty of time to turn it around and prove all the doubters wrong. It will be interesting to see if after the dust settles on this and Blu-Ray is declared the winner of the format war, sales of PS3s will pickup.
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:5, Informative)
OK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc [wikipedia.org]
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:4, Insightful)
* Apple Inc.
* Dell Inc.
* Hewlett-Packard Company
* Hitachi, Ltd.
* LG Electronics
* Mitsubishi Electric
* Panasonic (Matsushita Electric)
* Pioneer Corporation
* Royal Philips Electronics
* Samsung Electronics
* Sharp Corporation
* Sony Corporation
* Sun Microsystems
* TDK Corporation
* Thomson SA
* Twentieth Century Fox
* Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group / Buena Vista Home Entertainment
* Warner Home Video Inc.
That is basically every major player in consumer electronics and most of the major Hollywood studios with the exception of Toshiba. Every format is in fact a standard because a standard is:
A standard can be developed privately or unilaterally, for example by a corporation, regulatory body, military, etc. Standards can also be developed by groups such as trade unions, and trade associations. Standards organizations usually have more diverse input and usually develop voluntary standards: these might become mandatory if adopted by a government, business contract, etc.
The standardization process may be by edict or may involve the formal consensus of technical experts.
No part of that implies a standard must be the only player in it's niche or even a majority player.
Your just blathering on about some nonsensical argument. HD DVD was a standard as well. You had to conform to a technical spec and pay the consortium a fee to place a HD DVD brand on it. The two format were virtually identical in all important ways except support, region codes and capacity. Your bizzare argument over "standard" and "proprietary" applies to HD DVD as well. It also doesn't make much sense to develop a standard and then not push it into your latest electronics does it? I'm not sure of how you can really mentally contort yourself in that way. We had 2 formats. About roughly the same merits and drawbacks and then a power play via the content producers who decided the winning format. At no point was HD DVD some open format. At no point was either DRM free, non-Proprietary, backed by one company, or in some drastic way superior. It was a battle of two morally, technically, and economically equal entities.
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:5, Informative)
So no, it does not include the PS3.
What I find most interesting though is the loss of about 7k sales overall. That would be the cost of a more expensive format.
I personally am happy blue ray wins (I want 50GB burnable disks, not 30GB). But I would have been pretty satisfied to see Sony lose to just because I like to see big companies fail when pushing things to hard (I guess Toshiba pushed pretty hard too, but they keep to quite for it to be as enjoyable).
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I never bought a memory stick or PSP-format game, but Blu-Ray seems to be closer to Sony "getting it".
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Re:"blue ray player" totals (Score:5, Interesting)
Even still the PS3 does offer more open standard support than their competitors. You can use Generic hard drives, generic bluetooth devices, generic memory units, generic usb devices, etc. while it's mostly proprietary on the 360 and Wii.
Sony's Biggest folly IMO is their abhorrent lack of organization both blu-ray and the PS3 in their release configurations were running on un-finalized specs, blu-ray is just now finalizing it's spec and basically obsoleting most of the early players, and disc releases and the PS3 still feels incomplete and probably wont feel "finished" until the release of home/full integration of the x-media bar. At least the HD-DVD spec was finalized and all the players and media supported that spec on day 1.
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one week (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:one week (Score:5, Insightful)
But the overall point, that this format war is over, stands. Toshiba has to get what they can, and will have sales and such, but it's over.
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Poor Bastards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Poor Bastards (Score:5, Funny)
I simply sit in the trench and wait until the cacohpany of cash registers and emptying bank accounts comes to a halt. I then peer out from my fox-hole and look to see the vast wasteland around me: HD-DVD players being thrown out by the dozens, consumers with smoking holes in their wallets, and the wreckage of packing waste and store displays strewn about as if by some hurricane.
Somewhere, distant as if on the wind, I can hear the quiet sobbing of some videophile, lamenting the death of his preferred format.
Format war is hell.
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Favorite Civil War Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Poor Bastards (Score:4, Funny)
And that's why the rest of us wait for format wars to end.
Format wars? Is that a movie? How does it end, I haven't seen many new movies lately. I wait for them to come out on my Betamax machine.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Poor Bastards (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
* 2 you pick from the shelf, 2 in the box, 5 you choose from a small list and mail away for
Re:Poor Bastards (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty much describes me... (Score:4, Interesting)
Warner Brothers moving to BluRay, along with rumors of Universal and Paramount possibly following suit, have really been a good sign.
I bought PS3 (and Rock Band!) pretty quickly after the news came out.
Don't Count HD-DVD Out Yet (Score:5, Interesting)
In this vacuum of information, there's no surprise that HD-DVD sales collapsed, and it isn't because of the loss of Warner's catalog.
Since then the outcome is much less certain, however. Toshiba hasn't just conceded (and they shouldn't -- just prior to Warner's announcement it was 50/50), but instead they've come out swinging, dropping the price of their units by half (obviously it has to be cheap to compete with a format that largely was acquired for "free" as an added value of a game system). This price puts a very capable HD-DVD player with ethernet, HDMI, optical audio, and so on, as cost competitive with a decent upscaling DVD player -- and the Toshiba unit is a very good upscaling player. Add the 7 or more free HD-DVD movies that'll work forever even if HD-DVD dies, and a catalog of 1000 or so HD-DVD movies already on the market, it's a hell of a deal. If someone could hack this baby to be a media head unit it would absolutely own [yafla.com].
Reports are that sales have been absolutely massive, and Toshiba's campaign has been a success. Warner since has extended their HD-DVD support by almost a month, and other very positive rumors have circulated about HD-DVD.
Don't write HD-DVD off quite yet.
As an aside, one thing that really pisses me off about this war are claims that the end of the format war would be good for consumers. This is as logical as saying that Windows and IE should be universal -- good for consumers. Worse, Blu-ray has so many consumer-unfriendly facets (cost, no combo discs, a standard that's still in flux, early adopters getting screwed, the nebulous DRM of BD+) that it winning can never be perceived as a consumer win. Yeah, I'm biased because I didn't choose a format to win based upon a game unit I happened to buy.
In this vacuum of intelligence (Score:3, Insightful)
In this vacuum of intelligence, you state that there's still hope for HD-DVD. There's no chance it's coming back, not when HD-DVD has 30% of the market, and publishers care more about cost of production than satisfying the needs of a very small portion of people who own HD-DVD players.
Re:Don't Count HD-DVD Out Yet (Score:5, Insightful)
As an aside, one thing that really pisses me off about this war are claims that the end of the format war would be good for consumers. This is as logical as saying that Windows and IE should be universal -- good for consumers.
That's not even remotely the same thing. We're talking about formats here - interoperability is the important thing here. The analogous situation wouldn't be a universal Internet Explorer, it would be a universal HTML format. The competition between web browsers is reflected by the competition between player manufacturers.
Do you think the world would be better off with a version of HTML that only works in Internet Explorer and a version of HTML that only works in Firefox? Because that's the type of situation here.
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Re:Don't Count HD-DVD Out Yet (Score:5, Insightful)
And you have access to pricing figures for the studios to back up this "cost to them is marginal" argument, I would assume? Of course you don't. Such data is not published. Your are speculating out your wazoo, and you are wrong.
HD-DVD's most-trumpeted advantage is its ability to make use of existing DVD production facilities with only minor refits. No need to scrap the entire production line, you just upgrade it a bit. Blu-ray is fundamentally different in disc construction and has no such advantage. This was a conscious choice on the part of Sony. They sacrificed backwards compatibility of production equipment to get a more advanced disc structure. In this they have succeeded, as Blu-ray has scaled to 200GB capacities on an eight-layer disc in the lab. HD-DVD has scaled to 51GB with triple-layer discs in the lab. There is no comparison.
Studios that produce in both formats have to pay production houses to stamp them. The production houses have a choice of going exclusive with one format or gearing up to produce both.
The former situation requires the studios to negotiate separately with two production facilities, but (and here is the key) they're effectively splitting the number of discs produced in half for each facility. This hurts the studio's buying power just like it would hurt anyone else: more quantity equals lower prices. For disc production this is particularly acute because there is a very high cost to create the line to produce even one disc. The more discs you can stamp on that line, the cheaper it gets on a per-disc basis.
The latter situation requires the production house to foot the bill for two very different (and mutually incompatible) production lines. This is no small cost, and that cost is passed on to the studios when they order a run of discs.
So, no matter how you play it, your statement that "it doesn't cost more to do both formats" is completely without merit. It does cost more, more to author (HD-DVD and Blu-ray authoring tools are both incompatible and very expensive), more to produce (as outlined above), more to distribute (remember, two different kinds of packaging), and more to stock (there's only so much shelf space in stores).
This kind of lets the air out of your whole its-a-corporate-conspiracy argument, doesn't it?
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Re:Don't Count HD-DVD Out Yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Until your player stops working in a few years, as all electronics eventually do. And then you won't be able to get a replacement HD-DVD player.
There are 378 HD-DVD movies on the market [engadgethd.com].
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Re:Don't Count HD-DVD Out Yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering a search for 8-track player yields 371 results over at ebay right now, I'm not sure that is a huge problem.
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Odd numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of where you would go - the sales are there (Score:4, Informative)
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It's over (Score:5, Funny)
DVDs Still Work Just Fine (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:DVDs Still Work Just Fine (Score:5, Interesting)
When my DVD player burns out, I'll buy an HD player if it's the same price and plays my existing DVDs. After that, maybe I'd buy some HD discs. Otherwise, I'll just keep waiting. That's the attitude of 99.9% of consumers.
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Take with a grain of salt or two... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Take with a grain of salt or two... (Score:5, Interesting)
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is it finally time to buy a new dvd player? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a feeling that later would be better because lots of companies who were holding back or weren't producing Blu-Ray players will probably now... Any ideas?
Unpossible! (Score:4, Funny)
Of course they have (Score:4, Insightful)
The Warner announcement tipped the scales, and most consumers were ready for a winner to be declared. This is the kind of thing that becomes self-fulfilling -- customers want it tipped one way or another, and if they see the tip enough, everyone goes over to that side of the see-saw as fast as possible... particularly if Sony can stop shooting themselves in the foot by redesigning Blu-Ray every three months (ok, most of the new stuff is totally optional, but it doesn't help their case to create more customer confusion).
Obviously, Toshiba will try to lure back sales by slashing prices. The most interesting thing about HD-DVD is also the problem -- Toshiba can do this, because they're running HD-DVD like it's a gaming console (whether by choice or not, I don't know)... they sell all of the hardware, they get money back on licencing fees, so they can afford to blow out systems at cost, or even below cost, just as Sony and MS do with their games consoles (at least when they're new.. eventually, they want to get profitable on the HW).
DVD still works fine for me (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that's it's a foregone conclusion that either format is going to win out. Look at what happened to SACD and DVD-Audio.
Which is more shocking ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that people are surprised that after a studio said they'd not support it, the sales fell. Or the fact that people were willing to buy the disks in the middle of a format war when they had no guarantee it would last.
I mean, really, there was uncertainty over which would win out, and what would happen to the other. I realize if you've spent several thousand dollars on your hi-def kit you want to be able to see stuff with it, but I've always thought this whole hi-def format war was something I'd wait out.
Hell, if you bought an HDTV more than a few years ago, aren't you hosed since they've changed all of the specs and the whole HDMI debacle.
With early adoption comes the prospect of a lot of pain down the road.
Cheers
Toshiba's Reply (Score:4, Interesting)
Self fulfilling prophecy? (Score:5, Insightful)
All in all, this is a formula for a runaway sales drop in HD-DVD. Which to be honest, I am happy about, I _want_ there to be a winner (though I wish Sony didn't benefit from it...). But now I am getting to the point where I don't feel a purchase would potentially be for the losing format.
So in the end, I think that enough people said it was happening to the point where it made it happen.
MS has said from the start that the 360 can switch (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Real Cheap at Best Buy (Score:4, Interesting)
And there's talk of a PS3 without a hard drive and a few less features for even less money in the future(reminds me of the PS2 "slim" model release). Sony ended up making the right choice here as it forced people to buy the player as well with the console and lock millions of people into Blu-Ray.
IMO, it was the computer crowd that finally pushed it over the edge to win it. Blu-Ray burners and media can be found fairly easily, and with the backing of most of the computer giants as well, it was only a mater of time before it won out.
P.S. The actual laser assembly itself, which is what makes the drive different than a DVD drive aside from a few basic decoding chips and such *retails* for about $70. A $100 Blu-Ray reader should be no problem at all.(once analog TV is dropped in a year, it'll happen for sure)
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