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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."
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.
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Simple reasoning would tell us that you're an idiot. Just because the technology is similiar does not mean the units should have the same price. Further more I do remember when DVD players were 500 dollars a pop. It was nearly ten years ago when the technology was new. It's only now that they're 25 dollars. I wouldn't be suprised if in 2015 we're buying HD or BluRay drives for $50.