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High-Def Format Wars - Battle of the Freebies
An anonymous reader writes "It's come to this: eager to introduce the masses to the virtues of the next-gen DVD formats, the studios and manufacturers backing HD DVD and Blu-ray have begun giving discs away. It all started last month when Microsoft pacted with Universal to give away copies of 'King Kong' on HD DVD to consumers buying the XBox 360 HD DVD add on. Sony followed that up by offering a free 'Talladega Nights' Blu-ray with the first 500,000 PlayStation 3 units sold in the U.S.. Now today, HD DVD backer Toshiba has announced that it will give away *three* free HD DVD discs with every player sold for four months beginning on November 1st. With all these freebies, more people will likely have received free HD DVD/Blu-ray discs by the end of 2006 than will have actually paid for them."
HD-DVD Jon will save us... maybe it will take a ten line perl program this time.
First the rootkit, then the PS3, and now giving away "Talladega Nights"... why does Sony hate us so?
Reminds me of the time I bought a Pentium computer in the mid 1990s that came with a foot-high stack of CD-ROMs. It was a nice attempt at an intro to the possibilities of the new format, but there were only so many different versions of "Virtual Rock Gardening," "Compton's Interactive Encephalopathy," "Mavis Beacon Teachs Self-Neutering," and "The Adventures of Poorly-Rendered Cutscene Man" I could really get any use out of.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
With all these free discs floating around, I'm reminded of the AOL days. AOL supplied a generation of bored youngsters with hours of microwaving, shattering and throwing AOL media. Someday kids will remember the "good old days" when Billy knocked out Timmy's tooth with a Blu-ray and when mom made them scrub out the microwave to get all the HD goo off the sides.
I hate the term 'Sig'.
I doubt if it makes too much of a difference to their bottom lines, they can either give those movies away or let them sit on store shelves unsold.
Sony followed that up by offering a free 'Talladega Nights' Blu-ray with the first 500,000 PlayStation 3 units sold in the U.S..
...and here I thought corporations only focused on the short-term.
Given their production rates, I expect that promotion to last through 2007...
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I won't be impressed until he does it in 10 lines of VB.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Maybe that last Star Trek movie that Shatner directed... what was that one again? The Undiscovered Country? Yeah... that'll sell some DVD players!
Blasphemy!! How dare you confuse such a thing!!
Shatner did NOT direct The Undiscovered Country (ST VI), which was a great movie. He directed The Final Frontier (ST V), which was so horrifically bad that many ST fans consider it to not have happened.
Maybe they hope you'll be laughing so hard you won't realize how much money you just wasted?
Couldn't you just bang on your helmet and lick the window?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And mount it on a shark...... sharks with friggen lasers RULE.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!