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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."
I remember when I paid $199 for my Toshiba DVD player way back when, there was a free movie signup as well.
Lost in Space, Stargate, and Six Days Seven Nights were included.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Well, since the discs come with the expensive players (XBox 360-HDDVD and PS3), there will be nobody returning the discs because they can't play them. Although there will probably be a few why try to play them in the old player. It won't really help persuade anyone who doesn't already have a player.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Simple reasoning? I guess this is the excuss you give when you have no facts to back what you say. When DVD players cost $500 there build cost was still much higher than $25-50 prices come down when volumes go up, also when the chinese start making knock off units which dont have to recover the R&D costs. Consumers all want new technology at build cost and then complain about outsourcing to india and that it broke after 3 movies. Forget your reasoning and learn some facts.
"These people are creating their own illegal market for movies by distribtuing free products. It's really not sensible for them to both distribute free copies of movies, and say that for regular people, distributing free copies of movies is bad."
Before I blast your post to little bits. Why don't you explain the logic you used to arrive at your conclusion, keeping in mind we're talking about the copyright holder here.
I can't help but think "Man, those guys look all blocky and stretched" when Hockey Night in Canada is on.
That's the magic of HD. SD sports on a big screen (like my 50") are blocky and stretched. Sports in HD on a 50" screen, though, make me wonder how I ever watched sports in SD. The aspect ratio alone, which allows you to see more of the field at once, is worth the price of admission.
For me, at least, the leap from SD to HD when watching sports is literally equivalent to the leap from VHS in EP to progressive scan DVD. It's just plain better.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I'm guessing you didn't see the movie.
It's got plenty of action/racing scenes that will show off the high resolution, framerate, and 7.1 sound capabilities. It doesn't have loads of CG eye-candy special effects, but what are there will probably make for a damn good display of the capabilities of the format.
Manufacturing costs drop with time, as improvements are made to the process and as competition for manufacturing the underlying parts drives prices lower. What your parent seemed to be saying was that DVD players were expensive to manufacture, and commanded a high price. With time, they became cheaper to manufacture, and the savings were passed on to consumers. (Of course, mark-up probably also dropped with time, but the major reason for the price drop was likely cost reduction further up in the chain, which needed to be passed on to consumers, or else some competitor would pass their savings along.)
In the little "Adult Novelty Shop" I work in we carry the "Pirates" movie as a three disc set. One of these discs is an HDDVD. I have heard of a few other movies being out in HDDVD, but I have not seen the box covers to confirm this.
So right now, HDDVD appears to have an advantage, but that is from my little perspective from my little cornfield state capital in the central US.
With all the little 6 hour $9.95 movie sales that I do of junk scenes thrown together to make a DVD, I cannot see people caring about HDDVD. These movies sell very fast and some of the quality is worse than anything produced in the last 20 years. Not due to a scene being transferred from a VHS master, but from the low quality settings they are using to get these 6 hour DVDs together, and the 24 hour DVDs are far worse.
I mention the HDDVD disc inclusion when talking about the Pirates movie, but only one person has ever known what I was talking about and that is due to him being an early adopter. Most others don't want to pay the $49.95 fee for the three disc set. Most won't pay the 19.95 price for normal dvds. Not sure if porn is going to be that much of a driving force this time.