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Toshiba Subsidizes $200/Unit on New HD Player
WestTexasWaltz writes "According to a teardown analysis, Toshiba is losing $200 per unit, of its new HD DVD player, in order to gain some marketshare. Interesting that integrated circuits account for more of the cost than the drive itself. Also, this particular analyst concludes that Blu-ray and HD-DVD will "not be a repeat of VHS vs. Beta" and that a stalemate is the likely outcome."
What a crock. Thanks, but no thanks, I'll just stick with DVDs until Blu-ray loses this battle and the prices come down on HD-DVDs.
The cheap china manufacturers coming out with units that play both HD-DVD and BluRay discs... and pick up a player cheap at WalMart (or whathaveyou) for $100.
It's DVD-R and DVD+R all over again. Only with slightly better picture quality, if you have the right setup.
Oh great now there will be two drm laden piece of crap in my living room if I care to watch movies without worrying about the format.
I don't give a rat's ass about HD-DVD or BluRay or any new format... until a player comes out (third-party hacked or not) which overcomes the MPAA's nefarious ideas about region encoding or forced chapters. If you want some market share, grow some balls and deliver a machine that plays the media *I* purchased anytime that *I* want to, without sending a colorectal scan to the governments and corporations of the world. And while you're at it, make false advertising phrases like "Own it on HD-DVD today!" completely off limits.
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I predict the winner will be... DVD!
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
That law only applies to monopolies abusing there power to gain a monopoly in a different market!
Oh and it doesnt count anymore if you sponsor the party of the president. (better sponsor both candidates)
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
If that's true what will end up happening is that anybody who makes a player to play both will end up paying twice as much in royalties. Good times.
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It would be against Best Buys best interest. They can stock both players, and some people will buy both. Then they can make more money later selling combo versions to the same people.
Blockbuster and Netflix have an interest in seeing one win, but thats because they don't sell hardware, so they only get the negatives of dual inventory, not the profits.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'm afraid thats not entirely true. Under certain circumstances it is in fact illegal to sell things, domestically, below market value.
I'll have a Blu-ray by proxy, as I'll pick up a PS3.
FanFictionRecs.net
Specs: P4, 1GB RAM, 256MB Flash, 32MB MirrorBit Flash. And apparently runs Red Hat.
Is that overkill or what? Sounds like they don't have all the decoding hardware ready, so they went with that. Otherwise, all decoding could be done on a specifically designed chip, not needing anything as powerful as a P4, and I don't really see what they want that much RAM for. The flash size can probably fit the required parts of the OS without any trimming. Either that, or they've got lots of graphics there.
Even better, wait until the second gen (they will still be FAR from mainstream) and Wal-Mart will start stocking them. They more than likely will only stock one, and that will be the defacto winner. Not just because a lot of people buy consumer electronics at WM, but also because they will more than likely not stock movies in the other format. A huge mass of people will not even know that another standard EXISTS.
While Sony, by cramming a $500 to $600 PS3 down our throats, has decided to lose the war.
...
It's that simple.
Look, the major revenue is not the players themselves - it's the licenses for the patents from the manufacturers, the license fees from the people cranking out the discs (HD-DVD or Blu-Ray), the license fees from the music, the movies, the motion
You get the drift.
You can either play to win - or you can lose and look good doing so.
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Rather than go for market share now (which they can get later this year with the PS3) they have opted to get players into the hands of people for whom $500 or $1000 is not much of a difference, and make some profit in the meantime.
I honestly cannot see Toshiba grabbing a lot more marketshare with a $500 player than Sony with a $1k player; Given how few titles are out at the moment both are impractical for the average (or even not so average) consumer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Netflix and Blockbuster deal in discs, not players. Most of the movie studios will be bringing their films out in one format or the other, not both. HD-DVD has Universal; Blu-Ray has 20th Century Fox, MGM, and Sony Pictures. That means for many films, they'll have to stock one format or the other but not both, or not stock the hi-def at all. Which means overall, they have to support both formats, and it's up to their customers to have the right player if they want to see a movie from a studio aligned with one side or the other.
Three are a few studios, notably Paramount and Warner, that are going to try to do both formats. There, Blockbuster and Netflix may have some say. Netflix has stated that they'll support both formats, but until the actual discs appear I don't know what that means. They're gonna hate buying three copies of movies (HD, Blu, regular DVD), but it sounds like that's what they're gonna do.
What is Toshiba's incentive? Patents. The patent licenses for any technology format that gets a foothold in the mass market are *incredibly* lucrative. Every replicator who makes a DVD today has to pay a fee to patent licensing pools that cover the technology used. Likewise, every replicator who makes an HD DVD today has to pay a fee to license patents held by HD DVD godfathers NEC and Toshiba, and every replicator who makes a Blu-ray Disc has to pay a fee to a consortium that includes Sony and Pioneer, among others. (Or at least they will when all the various issues of patent ownership are settled to The Industry's satisfaction.) Too lazy to look this all up right now, but check out MPEG LA (www.mpegla.com) as an example of a big-time licensor of patents in this arena.
Patents on CD technology were worth millions (billions?) to Sony and Philips for a long time. They finally ran out in the late 1990s, but up until then everyone who made a CD anywhere in the world had to pay Sony and Philips for the privilege.
This is also, incidentally, why we have another format war. The stalemate between the two competing formats that eventually became DVD was broken behind the scenes when the companies involved came up with a last-minute compromise that preserved patents from both of the two warring camps in one design. That allowed DVD to launch as a single unified format. Unfortunately, there was no way to reconcile the dramatically different architecture of the Blu-ray Disc with the HD DVD.
Dude, for $500, I can play Red Steel and about 15 other games on the Wii, and ignore the format wars until I actually buy an HDTV that's big enough for me to care, in about three years when they'll be selling for $300 on sale. Including the Star Wars game coming out where you battle with light sabers as your Wii controller literally sounds like it is a lightsaber ... or a blaster ...
Not everyone likes to spend more than $500 on a lark.
[caveat - I liked the E3 demo so much, I sold my 400 shares of MSFT and bought 500 shares of Nintendo ADR]
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My decision was already made the other day, courtesy of Slashdot's story on the first 3 Blu-Ray offerings, of which "50 First Dates" was given as the reason to go HD and see Adam Sandler's every pore. Clearly, these people are not SERIOUS about selling to any but the most fanatic Early Adopters.
I can wait. Specifically, I can wait until they issue "Apocalypse Now" and other cinematographer's triumphs in 1080p and you can get a large 1080p TV and a player for it (that either plays the winning format, or both formats if the War is protracted) for a total under $1500.
With DVDs, I note that one can currently get computers (MythTV, etc) that will ignore all the playing restrictions. Here's my "horror" story on that.
I have a nice Pioneer DVR/DVD player (520H) that never met a DRM instruction it didn't obey slavishly. Not only will it not so much as record from a protected video tape, or tape made from DVD (that THAT, analogue hole) but it won't FFWD during the FBI warning or any of the corporate logos, or *ADS* if they choose to put that rule on their disc. The screen shows "That Operation is Forbidden by This Disc" when you hit the remote button repeatedly while waiting some minutes for your movie to actually start.
The other day, I popped in a disk while some news was on, and it started loading. Just at that moment, major breaking news hit the TV channel...and the DVD screen started showing the FBI warning. Frantically, I hit the STOP, then the EJECT buttons on the remote. But no, even those just got "That Operation is Forbidden By This Disc". Nothing could make it stop showing the FBI Warning and go back to the TV feed.
On discs with trailers and ads you can't skip, I've learned to pop in the disc and walk away from the TV for several minutes, because I get so mad if I stay. It's so great to put DVDs in my computer upstairs, where Kaffiene cheerfully skips all that crap and goes right to the movie I paid for, when I hit "go to Menu".
Maybe the computer world will defeat the DRM on an HD disk enough so that I can be the one to say what the computer is forbidden and allowed to do; that would make me opt in to this new technology, too.
But for a couple of years, I'm just going to wait and see. See DVDs. With a Linux media-computer that puts me in charge of my own damn living room.
I don't think 100K units is even remotely a problem.
If you'll look at the released Blu-ray movies, you'll note that somehow they mostly have fewer features on them than their supposedly smaller DVD counterparts. The released HDDVD's on the other hand, all have at least the same amount, and some of them have movie length added features.
How could this be? with Blu-ray's huge storage advantage? For that, you need to look closer at what they've actually managed to ship.
Shipping: HDDVD - 30GB dual layer discs. VC1 and H.264 encoded movies (at about 18Mb). Leaving about 10-15GB free for added features.
Shipping: Blu-Ray - 25GB single layer discs (They _still_ can't replicate dual layer discs with any meaningful yields) with Mpeg2 encoded movies (at about 25Mb). Leaving only 2-3GB free for specials.
Even aside from their lackluster video quality inherent in high bandwidth MPEG2, and that Sony has told studios not to use BD-J until at least next year, and that the Samsung player states clearly in it's manual that it cannot play dual layer discs, some people still continue to insist that somehow blu-ray is a better format.
When you compare it to titles that have embedded video special features, something blu-ray can't do at all. And picture quality that just can't be beat by Mpeg2, you can see why the format hasn't died, even with less support currently (it'll come). Of course, it can't hurt that the studios are getting huge amounts of support and help from Microsoft and Toshiba, while Sony, being Sony is giving them the usual cold shoulder.
does anyone doubt that millions will sell in the US alone within months of the launch?
Yes. Notice how your whole argument collapses when the PS3 fails miserably? Microsoft has a comparative system that will be 50% cheaper than PS3 when it releases. Very few parents will buy their kids a $600 PS3 for Xmas when the high end Xbox360 costs $300 and has many more games to choose from. The number of adults who buy a PS3 for a cheap Bluray player will be close to the number of adults who bought a PS2 for a cheap DVD player. That number is pretty close to zero. PS3 is a gaming system that will sit in kids bedrooms connected to their crappy non-HD TVs. PS3 will be a success in Japan due to Japanese xenophobia.
Also, this particular analyst concludes that Blu-ray and HD-DVD will "not be a repeat of VHS vs. Beta" and that a stalemate is the likely outcome.
:-) Basically they're saying:
Yeah, that's just retarded
"History be damned! No one will win *this* format war. The merits of these products are similar, and these things are always won on technological merit."
My bicyles
Not sure where you get your math, but 720p has 3x the pixel count of 480p, not 1.5x. Furthermore, NTSC DVD is not 480p but rather 480i. 1080i, which the HD-DVD does do, has 6.75x the pixel count of NTSC DVD. Then there's the matter of what equipment is used to produce the content, but why you would choose a lower resolution mode to compare format resolutions I have no idea. Additionally, exactly what is HD sound (wrt video) and do you expect it to be included in your bittorrent downloads? Is current AC3/DTS inadequate or are you just counting bits?
It's nice that you believe "the market" will deliver a better product to your HTPC but what is "the market" you refer to? Content owners or bootleggers? The motion picture industry wants to sell you DRM'ed discs, not free downloads to your PC.
Another thing, assuming you pay for the disc OR the download, one benefit of the disc is it ADDS 25GB (in your example) to the capacity of your playback system. With the download, you pay perhaps 1/4 the cost for the HD space as you do for the disc, but the hard drive is not archival media, the download costs of your internet connection aren't included, and you still haven't paid for the movie. I guess your model makes sense if you intend to download for free via bittorrent/p2p, you have broadband, and the opportunity cost of tying up your connection is reasonable.
Would you be willing to pay $1 per GB for the movie, $0.35 for the non-archival storage space, and a monthly fee for broadband? I'd rather buy the disc and rip it.
That's terrific, for you. But not everyone is satisfied with that sort of solution. Which explains why someone would choose a standalone player over a PS3.
*golf clap*
Bravo for being one of the schleps who's gotta have the latest toys. I, as a sensible consumer, appreciate the monetary sacrifice you've made so there's one less revision 1 piece of crap on the shelf at Best Buy.
AVphiles don't go out and blow a wad of cash on unproven junk. They purchase well tested and well thought out hardware so they can enjoy their music/videos without having to worry about upgrading in the next three to six months. If you read anything about that Toshiba Blu-ray player, you'd know it's crap (doesn't even do 1080p).
Thanks for playing.