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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 wince when I see such nonsense because I know it will sell units.
“Freebies”, that cost a few dollars in manufacturing and material costs, are being used to promote players that actually cost under a hundred dollars, but are priced at hundreds (if not close to a thousand) dollars. (Everyone remember when your average DVD players were priced at $500 and higher? Now they can be bought for $25-50 a pop. Simple reasoning tells us the same applies here.)
All in the name of a senseless format war where neither side offers anything compelling over the other, where the end result will be a market full of players that read both.
This is outright stupid.
Why bother.