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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."
So, is the fact that they're massively subsidizing the HD-DVD players a sign of trouble for Toshiba, or like everything else is it only a bad thing when Sony does it?
Anyway I for one will just sit and wait a few years until Samsung finally gets their way and gets to start making hybrid players that support both HD-DVDs and Blu-Rays. Samsung's said they want to, they're just being held up by consortium politics. I think those consortiums will get a little more lenient once time passes and they realize everyone's still just buying DVDs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_poli cy)
It's only illegal if they are selling for a substantially lower price in foreign markets compared to domestic markets. So in Japan, if they sold it for $2000 (US), then it would be dumping.
Otherwise, all free products would be illegal.
I know how a definitive winner could come about. Sometime before Christmas this year, Blockbuster and Netflix and Best Buy get together and agree to evaluate both the HD-DVD and Blue-Ray on terms of quality and price. Then they declare a winner. There is no way in hell either Blue-Ray or HD-DVD would survive if all three of them together said, "We don't want to stock more than one type of hi-def DVD. And this is the type we choose." Whichever they chose would thrive and whichever they dissed would die. Of course the longer they wait, the harder it will be to break the stalemate.
The only places HD-DVD are even mentioned anymore are Xbox 360 sites and a few tech sites like this one trying to generate hits in portraying some sort of 'format battle' with BluRay.
The battle was fought last year. HD-DVD lost badly. The studios have rallied around BluRay. As 1080p TVs fall into the sub-1000 dollar range over the next year there will be a battle between people sticking with the old DVD format. And then life will move on with BluRay until the next standard comes about a few years later.
Sears has HD-DVD players for $500. Honestly not that bad, except my DVD player is fine. When I opened the drive, it looked like a DVD. Said it was HD-DVD of course....but the videos playing were Mpeg4 (Mpeg4 on DVD likely).
Unfortunately Sony is taking too long to deploy Blu-Ray. I seriously think the lesser technology is going to win (once again).
What I have not seen so far is any kind of convincing argument that explains why the combination of a Blu-Ray drive in every PS3 along with higher capacities does not mean pretty much an automatic win for Blu-Ray.
Yes the PS3 is expensive. Put that aside for a second, does anyone doubt that millions will sell in the US alone within months of the launch? That then in turn is a few million consumers that will be able to play Blu-Ray media, and you know Sony is not going to pass up a chance to push Blu-Ray along with the PS3 including some Blu-Ray media in the PS3 box.
Contrast that against the still very expensive Toshiba player, and less than thirty HD titles. How long will it take to even get 100k units sold?
Studios would seem to agree with this assesment as there are more studios backing Blu-Ray than HD-DVD.
On the computer front for storage alone, why would you buy an HD-DVD burner when Blu-Ray discs hold more data, and the blank discs themselves seem to be cheaper (in a Slashdot study of Japanese HD media a few months back the HD-DVD 20GB media was more expensive than Blu-Ray 25GB media).
I can't see personally how the situation looks anything like a stalemate. It looks like a rout in the making. Would HD-DVD even be around if Microsoft was not still backing it? And would HD-DVD even still be pushed by Microsfot if it was not for HD-DVD using Microsofts own menuing system for movies (for which they would of course collect licencing fees), not to mention Blu-Ray using a menuing system based on a form of Java? Microsoft seems to be backing HD-DVD more out of hubris than anything else.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'll probably be getting a PS3 and so will have a Blu-Ray player...
Having had a taste of HD video (on Dish, which I eventually cancled due to repitition of content) I actually am looking forward to some movies in true HD. Even 720P looks so much nicer than even normal digital cable, you don't need to get a 1080p set for dramatic effect.
I'm putting off buying the new Star Wars box set until a re-release in a higher definition format.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Presuming that since HD-DVD and BLU-RAY are roughly equivalent products that players for each have roughly equivalent components does that mean Sony has a $300 profit - a 43% margin (minus whatever the middlemen skim off) on their $1000 BLU-RAY player?
There was a story some months ago about studios considering dropping region coding for both formats, but I've never seen a followup to see if that's the case.
One nice thing for those in the US is that even with region coding on, for Blu-Ray Japan and the US are considered to be the same region. Great for games and just as good for anime.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Some people don't have the eyes to distinguish between even 800x600 and 1024x768. Even knowing that, it's still weird to me that people can't perceive jaggies while watching DVDs or slightly sub-standard bitrates during fast motion. I was trying to show my dad the difference between HD and normal TV broadcasts, and it just didn't work for him. It's not that one's eyesight is particularly problematic, but rather that some people just don't analyze video quality as much as others, it would seem.
I heard that video game consoles being loss leaders was an urban legend, perhaps due to faulty analysis.
This article is an ad for iSuppli Corp and their teardown services. Having read their similar analysis of the XBox 360 and iMac Core Duo, I'm underwhelmed with everything that's come out of them. There's a lot of estimates based on the general going rate for buying things, but I don't see any reason to believe iSuppli has real insight into the part pricing scale a company like Toshiba receives on their purchases. For all we know, Intel is selling them CPUs "at a loss" relative to the going rate for some business purpose none of us have insight into. There's all kinds of deals like that going on behind the scenes of flashy tech stuff, where products are sometimes paid for out of company's advertising budgets rather than their operating ones. What you can be sure of is that none of those companies are worried about keeping iSuppli up to date on how that effects retail pricing.
Both formats use AACS for copy production. In addition, Blu-ray uses BD+ on top of AACS.
My video compression blog
All that proves is that you are NOT a Videophile and are certainly NOT a Audio/Videophile early adopter. The fact is Stores are having a hard time Keeping the Toshiba HD-DVD's on the shelf. People are buying them, and the price support is is helping that I am sure, the price is not too bad the PQ is awesome and they do a heck of a job upconverting. And us Videophiles DO care about SD vs HD. I can't certainly tell and enjoy the difference in PQ betwee SD and HD on my fine display.
Even worse, there is a Broadcom ASIC that performs the actual decoding. The Pentium 4 must just be used for DRM and drawing the menus.
Perhaps because you want a disc player with a user interface that isn't a pile of turd? Every built-into-a-console dvd player I've ever used has been a piece of junk and has had serious issues with video quality ...
Yes that would be nice, but I can live with a somewhat poorer interface for a savings of hundreds of dollars. I would like a blu-ray or HD-DVD player but I simply cannot justify a standalone unit, while I can justify a Blu-Ray and game console together (especially one that can replace an aging PS2 and also play new games).
I actually used the PS2 as my only DVD player for about a year before standalone players dropped to the point I was willing to buy one. It was not actually that bad to use after buying the remote.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think a better example is the original DIVX systems, only much more expensive and with DRM.
I think it is time to refer to regular DVD as "Open DVD" again, and call all current HD-DVD systems "Restricted DVD" or "Encumbered DVD" until a real high-definition DVD that only extends current DVD to higher resolutions is out.
The most likely winner is the first player system to support higher quality, HD-quality encoding on some type of unencumbered data storage disc, probably as an option in addition to one of the other formats (kind of like DivX (not the one above) on some DVD players now). I'm predicting a "third way". Then, one way or another, people will transcode the Hollywood-supplied, fair-use-destroying DRM format to that other format (e.g., analog hole->computer->"third way" HD DVD). It will ultimately be business as usual for legitimate purchasers as well as the illegal operations. I'm predicting 2 years maximum before this starts to happen, maybe sooner. Either that, or Blu-ray and HD-DVD will be rejected by the consumer entirely, and the studios and manufacturers will realize their mistake and do something more reasonable, but I think the odds of that are low.
What about the DCMA, you say? That's mainly a USA problem. It won't stop most of the rest of the world, and the attempts to propagate the legislation to other countries have been quite mixed (e.g., in many countries, even if the legislation is introduced in some form, it only applies if the act was illegal in the first place -- fair use is protected), and it will probably be too late.
Ummm...no, it's really not like DVD-R and DVD+R. The only difference there is spindle speed, 1.2:1 difference to be exact, DVD+R to DVD-R. The underlying technology and interface are exactly the same beyond that. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are totally different technologies. HD-DVD uses a standard red laser operating at a much lower wavelength of light, yielding a much larger focal point of light. Blu-Ray uses a blue laser with a higher wavelength and smaller focal point of light. The more highly focused, tighter blue laser can read red laser burned, or imprinted media, but the red laser cannot read the blue laser burned or imprinted media. Beyond the cost for a blue laser system, you then have to support two dual chip sets for processing HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs because of the completely different DRM standards being used. And yes, this is hardware decoded in consumer devices so you're talking about quite a cost if you wanted to build custom ASICs to do both in one chipset, in licensing fees alone! So, I really don't see a dual format drive hitting the market any time soon. It would be too costly to build right now. Maybe when one has a clear lead we'll see one, but then it will be too late for one of the formats and you'll be paying a high price so you can play the discs you bought from the losing side.
I'd say wait for a Blu-Ray enabled PC or laptop to come out, followed by a software decoder for the other format, HD-DVD. I'm sure a computer-based playback device will be fast enough to support an HD-DVD decoder so you could play HD-DVDs on your internal (or external) Blu-Ray drive.
So the HD-DVD movies are almost out of space as it is and there seems to be no space savings at all in using MP4 over MP2. And it seems that space is at more of a premium than we had thought, with Blu-Ray having a distinct edge once dual layer discs arrive.
You're ignoring a few critical details: bitrate and quality.
If you take a 6gb dvd encoded with mpeg2, you can encode it at the same quality using 2gb of space.
I could encode a bluray movie in 2gb, but it would look like crap. It in no way means that the new codecs are somehow yielding poorer results than mpeg2. Given two files of equal size, one encoded with mpeg4 or vc1, and one encoded with mpeg2, the mpeg4/vc1 file will be closer to the source material than the mpeg2 file.
The logical response to your observation is that the final size of the encoded video is being dictated by the total amount of content provided on the disc, not by the amount of space available.
Toshiba has a lot of the IP behind HD DVD. They stand to get a few bucks from 10's of millions of (legally licensed) HD DVD player manufactured in the next decade -- but only if HD DVD wins.
Loosing a few bucks on initial HD DVD shipments is chump change in comparison.
Why is it that all chineese designed stuff has CRAP remote controls.
* crap looking designs, made by engineers that probably only have used remotes themselves in the last 5 years, not from 1985 when they were kids. Having
that indirect experience of good/crap remotes help in design.
* week IR power, why is it their remotes are so damn week, needing 30deg field or 5ft distance? Do they use crap LEDs or bad software reading it?
Are their test clients living in closets? Common, get with it, even in 1990 we had sony remotes working at every angle from 30 feet.
* crap battery covers, that break the clips or come loose. Get a clue designers
Spend the $40k and get someone in germany to design it. Not your 12 year old 'wizz kid' for $12 and 9 kilos of rice and a PS2
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.