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Blu-ray/HD DVD Disc Sales Numbers Revealed
An anonymous reader writes "The High-Def format wars finally have a yardstick against which to measure who's winning with the first public release of VideoScan sales figures for both HD DVD and Blu-ray. The first two weeks' worth of data seem to back up what many predicted — that the Blu-ray-enabled PS3 is helping Sony quickly close the gap with HD DVD, with almost three Blu-ray discs sold for every one HD DVD during the first week of January. HD DVD still leads in overall discs sold since inception, but that lead looks to be quickly dwindling. While they do show a trend, the results from VideoScan are still fairly vague. Why are consumers being denied the information they need to make a considered choice?"
This hurts the consumer on way too many levels. You might as well release music in several formats...Oh, wait a minute...where's my 8 track player? Ooh! I just found my Betamax VCR. Screw this DVD shit, it won't last out the year's end.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Ha! It's not over yet, and there hasn't been a format war that Sony has won, so I wouldn't count that chicken before it's hatched.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It's pretty obvious to me, the data is proprietary, so it's easier to keep it hidden than to start the "I'm selling more than you are" war.
Is this the same Blue Ray Of Death that I heard about?
No sig for now.
Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!
You know, the Blu-ray/HD DVD squabble is not actually important. You rights aren't being trampled on. Most people couldn't care less about it; they're happy with their DVDs and don't mind letting you *philes hash it out with your disposable income.
Get a grip.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Dual format players will win this war. As soon as this sells below $500, all other makers will follow. Right now it sells for $1200.
r -multi-player-unboxed/
"Well this is more like it. After waiting forever between the initial announcement and first retail availability of the first wave of HD disc devices, LG's BH100 really rocketed to the shelves, and has just participated in its first unboxing (that we've heard of) mere weeks after the announcement at CES. We're a little disconcerted by that big front-and-center dent on the box, but the unit itself looks just dandy, and gadgetaholic promises a full review in the coming days. But that's not what you're here for, you just wanted to see this little guy ripped from his Styrofoam cocoon and flap his little Red and Blue wings, so hit the read link for the whole event. Fly, BH100, fly."
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/22/lgs-bh100-supe
That comment is insane for so many reasons. Not the least of which being that Blu-Ray could "beat" HD-DVD and still lose. If they 5 times as many Blu-Ray media as HD-DVD, but only sell 10,000 units per year, then they fail. From TFA:
you won't find any hard sales figures here
In other words, we have no idea how either format is doing on an absolute scale.
"According to VideoScan, during the first two weeks of January, Blu-ray discs outsold HD DVD by more than a 2:1 margin."
Why does the summary make Blu-Ray sound better by saying it outsold HD DVD by 3:1 in 1 week? Do I detect a bias?
- Sony has never won a format war, haven't they learned their lesson? Just look at Beta and MD.
- Sony has had great sucess with their formats, can you say CD?
- There is no reason for anybody to even upgrade past DVD. There is simply no big difference between any new formats and DVD
- I simply will not buy anything from Sony after the whole DRM fiasco
- HD will win out because there will be more HD players on the market because of the cheap HD DVD add on for the Xbox 360
- There will be more Blue Ray players on the market because every PS3 comes with a Blue Ray drive
- Nobody will buy the HD DVD drive addon for the Xbox 360 because it is too expensive
- Nobody will buy the PS3 because it is too expensive
- Blue Ray disks hold more information than HD DVD disks and so Blue Ray will win
- HD DVD disks hold more information than Blue Ray disks so HD DVD will win
- What are you guys talking about? Its all about Nintendo
- Neither format will win because people will be downloading movies from here on our
- The name HD DVD just sounds better than Blue Ray
- The name Blue Ray just sounds better than HD DVD
- Movies these days are worthless I havent watched a movie in 25 years
Hopes this helps shed some light on which format is better.The usual reply to your comment on Slashdot would ne "You forgot about audio CD?" or "What about 3.5" floppies?" but I'll add another format to the list: 8mm tapes. They were quite dominant before the spread of MiniDV.
So, how many of these Blu-ray hardware sales actually *movies*? You know, the stuff that HD-DVD is a direct competitor for? If the format becomes something that's only economically viable to be used as game media for the PS3 then it becomes as relevant as SNES cartridges in the long run.
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You must not be familiar with Verizon.
The one thought that keeps swirling through my mind when I browse through the HD movie section at my local Best Buy is, Who the HECK figures out the pricing for these things?!
How can Little Man cost $29 but the Fifth Element is only $19!?
I've owned the HD-DVD drive for the XBox360 now since it's launch and the only HD disc I currently own is the free copy of King Kong that came with it.
I'm floored that new titles aren't being released in both DVD and in their respective HD format at the same time. The studios seem too busy trying to 'catch up', releasing titles already available on DVD. I know they're doing this in hopes that people purchase both the DVD version and HD version when it's released later, in an effort to double their money.
Makes me want to vomit.
FWIW, Bluray is superior to HD-DVD in many ways. So it has had (and still has) a good chance of "winning" against the competing HD-DVD format. The real problem with such a "win" is that it's not much of a "win" if you claim victory in the battle, but lose the war. Allow me to explain.
Despite all the hype surrounding HD-this and High Resolution-that, there hasn't been a major push by consumers to move to the new High Definition televisions. As it would seem, the vast majority of consumers are happy enough with their TVs as they are today. The real consumer push has been a much different one than quality.
Consumers today are looking for convenience first and quality second. They want to be able to sit in their living room and chose what they want to watch (or play!), when they want to watch it. Nothing makes this more apparent than the popularity of the TIVO and other DVR players.
These players timeshift shows from their regular schedules to a time that is more convenient for the viewer. Thanks to thier ties with online TV schedules, a user can setup his DVR to record dozens of shows. When he feels in the mood to watch something, he can then chose from the options at his disposal.
However, this process does have its drawbacks. The first one is that DVRs cause a drop in show quality. In order to balance real-time recording with space constraints, these devices must throw away a lot of information about the television stream. As a result, the quality drops.
The second drawback is that these devices have limited capacity. Once they are full, you must remove some material in order to make room for more material. This biases the devices against consumers who watch television on few, rare occasions, but enjoy a wide variety of entertainment.
The solution on the horizon is not digital transmissions over the airwaves, by digital cable, or even by plastic frisbees. The solution is to stream the video directly to the consumer over a broadband internet line. This allows the consumer to access a wide variety of quality material, but without the same storage drawbacks that limit DVR devices.
So what you'll see in the future is that the Bluray vs. HD-DVD war won't matter. The real winner will be Internet ala carte providers, who give the consumers what they want, when they want it. Sony shouldn't fear HD-DVD. They should fear Apple iTunes.
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Just for a moment, forget the consumer (everyone else is doing it...)
Whatever your feelings re PS3, you know it's going to sell 10 million units plus in a short time. In the meantime, only relatively small numbers of consumers are actually buying either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players. DVD is good enough for most. Although the PS3 isn't primarily a Blu-Ray player, it does have that feature.
So when you're a movie studio or retailer and looking at the current / expected install base of HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray capable players over the next year or so, Blu-Ray is the only way to go. The PS3 is putting high definition playback into homes ahead of the mainstream demand. I read last week (Ars Technica I think) that total sales of Blu-Ray plus HD-DVD standalone players were around 700,000 in the US so far. PS3 alone is probably past that by now.
Standalone players are likely to sell more discs per unit than PS3s, but I'd guess many people with $600 to spend on a console will also grab a few Blu-Ray discs to try out.
It's more like the Digg vs. Slashdot war, with most Digg stories reporting dismal PS3 sales and most slashdot stories reporting good BD sales.
One thing is certain. Only one device can play 30Mbit H.264 HD files from a network and it's a BD player.
Why are consumers being denied the information they need to make a considered choice?
Because we are viewed as irreverent by the large multinational corporations that stuff gadgets down our throats. In reality, they want us to buy both formats, and, of course, the content (at least) twice, also.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
The sales charts are confusing
All the people that bought a PS3 for christmas ran out to buy a blu ray to play on it. It's a temporary bump in sales.
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Not always. If the channel is coming in to the box digitally, it does not usually get transcoded. It's much easier for the box to record the bits directly. Video quality and ease of use are vastly superior to VHS.
Blu ray only outsold them 2:1 in a period when the only new releases were on Blu-ray? That's just pathetic.
Vouchers were given inside Playstation 3 boxes for free Blu-Ray discs. Everyone who bought a PS3 simply for gaming went out and used these vouchers up.
The more interesting comparison would be the number of HDDVD's sold against the number of Blu-Ray discs sold - vouchers used.
This whole Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD clusterfuck won't be resolved for me until Criterion decides to support on or the other formats. The current movie selection on both formats is pathetic. Just like with quality games driving console adoption, it's the quality movies that matter. What, I'm going to spend ~$500 so I can watch crap like _Underworld Evolution_ in High Definition? Christ, I don't want to watch that SD! (Perhaps when Kate Beckinsale rips her clothes off on camera I'll watch another one of those shitty vampire crap fests)
So what you'll see in the future is that the Bluray vs. HD-DVD war won't matter. The real winner will be Internet ala carte providers, who give the consumers what they want, when they want it. Sony shouldn't fear HD-DVD. They should fear Apple iTunes.
Perhaps next generation. But for this revision of video delivery, there still a monolithic population of technology impaired with too much money and too few techno savy people. There is a lack of easy to use downloaded data to TV appliances. Easy to use being the key word. Your Ipod could do. But they are still not DVD player easy to use yet. VCRs and DVD players still partly confound the median consumer. perhaps in 25 years when the last inept boomer dies we may see itunes overtake disc media, but our geek fantasies of seeing everyone download their TV will be some time away.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I've been thinking about this. Why are consumer electronics companies so eager to stick DRM on products (typically they dislike it, it ads to cost and slows consumer adoption).
Because the content companies (Motion Picture folks) have to buy in. If there was just one format the consumer electronic companies could say, high def disk, take it or leave it. However since there are two formats the Studios can choose the format the offers the most protection. In a way because of the format war the studios got to say "Add DRM" or we'll go with the competeing HD format here.
It doesn't help that sony owns electronics and content, and the content part is clearly running the company.
My local Blockbuster carries both HDDVD and BlueRay. A couple of weeks ago I asked the guys behind the counter what customers were more interested in, they agreed that it was about 3:1 in favor of HD. Personally I think it is too early to declare a winner. PS/3's "recent" introduction may cause a spike in demand. HDDVD folks may be buying more slowly now that the novelty has worn off, and this will happen with the BlueRay "newcomers" too.
They still could lose it (this is Sony we're talking about here). But at the end of the day they're dumping 100,000 PS3s into the market per week so pragmatism alone suggests they'd need to have a monstrous screw-up to lose at this point.
You raise a very insightful point about quality and convenience. Think of the tape to CD and VHS to DVD leaps. Both new technologies had quality improvements over their predecessors but I'd argue neither would have taken off as quickly as they did (or at all) without the massive improvements in convenience. No more having to fast forward or rewind a tape or VHS movie to get to your favorite track or part of the movie, with the new format you could get where you wanted to go in a second. That was a huge factor when I moved to from tapes to CD's and it also came into play with DVD's. Rewinding a movie before you watched it or before returning it to the video store was a massive pain in the butt. You no longer had to worry about a bad player shredding the DVD or CD which was also a huge plus with both moves. Quality was more of a factor to convince me to move from VHS to DVD but you better believe that if that quality improvement didn't also include the improvements in convenience (e.g. it was still tape based or a single movie had to be split onto multiple discs) then I don't think the format would have caught on.
Anonymous Coward mentioned Compact Disc Digital Audio, Microfloppy (the ubiquitous-until-recently 3.5" disk that beat Mitsumi's QuickDisk), and Video8 (beat VHS-C). In addition, how about the large-screen video game format war? In the console generation that included the PlayStation 2, Sony's format has beaten those of GameCube, Xbox, set-top Lenovo-compatible PCs, and set-top Macintosh computers in terms of number of discs sold.
Wow: "Movies these days are worthless I havent watched a movie in 25 years" ... That's hard unless this guy doesn't watch any movies on DVDs, in theater, TV, etc. In fact, does he even watch TV shows? ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Those graphs are dumb.
So are people. They don't even know that they're dumb.
KFG
What about the people who created something, found that someone had already created the same thing a decade ago, and had to cease and desist or (worse) pay damages? It happened to George Harrison (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music), it happened to Michael Bolton (Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton), and it happened to Ross Williams (whose LZRW family algorithms were later found to have patent problems).
Why are we getting shafted in Denmark? $930.... ?
what are those 441$ paying for?
When I first saw those graphs I thought they were advertisements and ignored them......
I am not a number. I am a free man!
I dunno. Sony is doing pretty good on getting products out in a timely manner. There's been a blu-ray burner shipping since about August of '06 (BR burners are already under $700) and as far as I can tell, there's still not a HD-DVD burner shipping. Toshiba is supposed to start shipping one in volume next month and NEC was supposed to start shipping one mid last year, then August, then Christmas time, I can't find anywhere on the web where they are actually SELLING them.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Yes, it's definitely a bias as 2 and 3 never appear next to each other on a keyboard.
Besides, I don't think you give consumers enough credit. They'll spend the time to figure something out (or get the kid next door to set it up for them) if they REALLY want it. It's only when they don't care about something that the technology goes unused. (e.g. The infamous VCR clock blinking 12:00.) If the popularity of iTunes television shows is any indicator, consumers care about this technology.
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If not, then the sales numbers analyzed are absolutely meaningless. Revisit once the adult industry has ramped up to full production.
The lack of detailed sales data is nothing new from Nielsen and not a conspiracy by the big corporate entertainment companies. Nielsen is independent from any entertainment company (it's parent company owns The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard magazines and the Nielsen TV ratings, among other entities). The reason it doesn't provide specific and detailed numbers is simple business. Nielsen makes its money by selling its data, in this case mostly to the studios and entertainment companies. If it made specific sales figures widely available to news outlets for free, it wouldn't be able to sell that same data to its many clients who could pick it up for free on the Net.
"Not always. If the channel is coming in to the box digitally, it does not usually get transcoded."
I'd like to amend that a bit - in consumer DVRs, high-def content NEVER gets transcoded. It is always simply dumped to disc without decoding and/or reencoding. The transport stream is only decoded for playback.
Realtime high definition encoders simply do not exist, at least not at the price points needed to be put into a consumer device. The closest thing is the Slingbox PRO, but that downscales to SD before compression.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
According to VideoScan, during the first two weeks of January, Blu-ray discs outsold HD DVD by more than a 2:1 margin. It should be noted that the two weeks in question saw only two new high-def disc releases -- both from Blu-ray ('The Covenant' on Jan 2, and 'Crank' on Jan 9).
Even though both movies were awful, and I secretly hope people were buying the discs to smash them in order that no one will ever be forced to watch that crap again, you tend to see a massive spike in movie/book/music sales when a product is released followed by slower sales for the rest of its life. This is (to a certain extent) like comparing the sales of XBox 360 software to PS3 software in Japan over the past 2 weeks when the XBox 360 had The Idolmaster and Gears of War releases and the PS3 had no new software.
Information isn't sentient and as such, can't want anything. It doesn't want to be free, it doesn't care either way.
What, there are still people around who don't get the saying? Information wants to be free in the same way as water wants to leak.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
or they could win it.
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I bought PS3 specifically for Blu Ray. There aren't any games for it that I'd want to play yet, so I bought it because it was a relatively cheap, high quality DVD/Blu Ray player with HDMI output (Xbox is component only, so disks that require HDCP won't play in it). Now wait until it actually gets some games that will make it worth purchasing by gamers. Once that happens, you will see another spike in sales. It's a double whammy of sorts. Currently a lot of folks are buying it for Blu Ray. These folks will buy games later on because thing also plays games. OTOH folks who will buy it for games will buy Blu Ray disks as well because what the heck, if it plays them - why not?
It also helps that Blu Ray has greater studio and industry support. The only studio that's HD-DVD exclusive is Universal. There are quite a few studios (including those owned by Sony) that are exclusive to Blu Ray. And lastly, Apple and Dell are Blu-Ray only. Need I say more.
An anonymous reader writes:
Yeah, an anonymous reader who just happens to work for Sony.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I see stupid people... all the time... they walk around like everyone else... they don't even know they're stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Of course I meant to say country. Of course, as such it applies to both the US and the UK, and most other places on the planet besides. About the only people who could pull it off right now are Japanese who live in major metropolitan areas.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As to the question "Why are consumers being denied the information they need to make a considered choice?," I answer: I have all the information I need. With the DRM constraints, I don't intend to buy discs of either format.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Other points aside, PS2 is a platform, not a format.
And it doesn't cost an extra $150. I'll take it over HD-DVD any day.
What the hell are you talking about? For one, there is *NO* HD-DVR out there that encodes the material it's storing. None. Zero. Nada. There's simply too much video to make that realistic. Every one of these machines simply demodulates the QAM, pulls out the MPEG stream, and saves it to disk. That's it. No quality loss whatsoever.
Second, storage is a solved problem. Harddisks get bigger every single day. It's simply not an issue. Granted, existing DVRs are a little lean on storage, but that will change with time (my Myth box at home has 250GB, and there are many with 1TB+ setups).
Third, the very idea of Internet distribution of HD, which can be upwards of 7 *gigabytes per hour*, is simply laughable. There's no way in hell that would get popular enough to sway the HD-DVD/Blu-ray battle in any way whatsoever.
Except that it's crippled with region coding, which kills my interest in it... at least until someone releases a region-free Bluray player.
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"Despite all the hype surrounding HD-this and High Resolution-that, there hasn't been a major push by consumers to move to the new High Definition televisions." Yes you're completely correct - this Christmas season didn't see an exponential increase in sales of HDTV's, and TimeWarner has not sold out every last one of its Hi-Def DVR units, have they? Wait.
Like I said, I reckon pragmatism alone suggests they'll win. Personally I couldn't give a crap about the formats since they're almost identicial, however since I intend to get a PS3 I would prefer if it was Blu-Ray for obvious reasons. My other remark was alluding to Sony's uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
the Blu-ray enabled PS3 is helping Sony quickly close the gap with HD DVD, with almost three Blu-ray discs sold
What, like 2.4 discs sold? Somebody just dropped a Hamilton and took off with a BR?
What's that? The rest of the sentence? Oh, I just assumed...
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I could go out and buy the 360 HD DVD drive whenever I felt like it. I have a 50" DLP and HD video is a huge difference from the upconverting DVD player I already have. I was looking at my Netflix que last night and noticed out of 50 movies in my que only 4 of them had the option of having them send me a HD DVD instead of the regular one. Not enough movies at this point to make me even think of going to HD DVD. Blu-Ray is out, I don't support Sony and would not buy their format ever.
My myth box, for example, transcodes the OTA MPEG-2 stream to save space after the recording is done. 90% of the time, when I watch a program it has happened to have completed transcoding.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If it didn't hitting 'pause' on a live stream and then 'play' several hours later would cause a noticable drop in quality.
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It is really hard to see how HD-DVD could possibly win in those circumstances.
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An interesting site to keep track of a few battles like this is eProductwars.com. In particular, they have a section that tracks various Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD stats - mostly based on Amazon data it would seem. It seems to track with what the original article is saying.
It's really not at all surprising Blu-Ray would be pulling substantially ahead and growing, with every PS3 sold being another Blu-Ray player in a consumers home. I know two people at work that have bought PS3's and they moth make extensive use of the Blu-Ray feature. Standalone players are a tougher sell at the moment with still not that much in the way of selection, and console add-ons (like the 360 HD-DVD player) never sell to a very significant percentage of the user base of any system - and that's when they can be used to play games!
You know who really has the pulse of this fight though? Netflix. And that data, as far as I know, cannot be found in the open anywhere. They are the first place people would go for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies I think, as people turn to Netflix to check it out first if they have a PS3 and are curious, and would also go there to defray costs and find out which discs were worth buying.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, according to your post, your thesis is that "the Bluray vs. HD-DVD war won't matter". Are you changing your mind now?
You mention it yourselve, the CD. What not everyone knows that the CD owns a lot to philips. The minidisk was a direct competitor to a Philips product, so was betamax.
Blu-Ray? Another Philips-Sony partnership. Mmmm, so by some extremely wide logic Blu-Ray must be a winner based on past performance.
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Just because someone owns a PS3 does not mean they own a television that will benefit from the enhanced resolution over DVD...you forget, MANY MANY people still have standard def 480i tv's with NO hdtv's in their lives.
I would argue that most of the PS3 user base has TV's that support 720P or greater.
But remove that, and people are still able to play Blu-Ray discs even on a 480i device. To you or I there might not seem like much of a point, but remember if these people are thinking to buy an HD-TV later they may well already be buying Blu-Ray media. I know someone who bought a few Blu-Ray movies in the anticipation of getting a PS3 in a month or two!
Really though, why does it not make sense that anoyone able to spend $500 for a PS3 would also have spent a fair amount on a TV set? There are tens of millions of HD-TV sets in people's homes today.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The next format challenger will be the Holographic Disc. 1.6 TB on a single disc....
I'll be patient, and TiVo it when it's on cable.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
We aren't talking about console sales. We are talking about Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD sales.
For the fight you mentioned, there is a better place to look for that as well. One interesting thing to note there is that demand for the PS3 is artificially suppressed on that graph by Amazon not having stock ready to buy all the time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So, The players can't do 1080p yet... In other words, you've said that I'm completely correct, but used bold to imply that I'm not.
Thanks.
That might in 10 years after the price is below $200, but in the meantime PS3 sales are looking rather poor compared to Xbox360 and Wii.
That's actually not exactly true, it's still hard to find PS3's everywhere (note that Amazon still does not have them "in stock", only through third party sellers with a $100 markup).
However the point is irrelevant to this discussion, because it doesn't matter for the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray fight what the 360 or Wii sales are like - they do not play HD-DVD movies (at least not directly). What matters is the total number of Blu-Ray players on the market (the PS3 plus all standalone players) vs. the number of standalone HD-DVD players (the 360 add-on included). The original point stands that the PS3 is far outselling all other standalone players, and that means pretty much inevitable growth in that format as the year progresses and Sony is able to iron out production issues. Even with spotty production ongoing, 6 million PS3's in people's hands by the end of the year (which is a low figure that assumes production continues to flounder) would far outstrip the number of standalone HD-DVD players sold.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No. I'm talking about convenience > quality. Quality is not a driving factor at the moment, save for the early adopters. Consumers would much rather have convenience with acceptable quality rather than high quality with no noticeable increase in convenience. (If anything, the high def stuff is a mild decrease.)
Thus a minor quality upgrade (e.g. iTunes is 480p) coupled with a major increase in convenience is going to win the day; not the High Def frisbees. In addition, consumers will soon be able to have their cake and eat it too. Microsoft is already showing that Hi Def downloads that take advantage of more modern compression methods are possible on the higher end of the consumer bandwidth scale. The quality isn't quite as good as a $30 frisbee, but that's not going to swap most consumers. They can get the movie or TV show they want, when they want it, and for the price they want it.
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Great, but unless the DVR is supplied by your cable/satellite company the signal is not coming in digitally so bits will always get transcoded. Without CableCard support the DVR has no knowledge of how to decode the digital signal, the cable box decodes it and outputs analog which the DVR just reencodes. Cable company supplised boxes generally suck, so until TiVo gets CableCard support the majority of people will still be reencoding the digital stream.
You completely misunderstood my post. The point is not that HD-DVD is "gonna win": the point is simply that Sony could beat HD-DVD and still fail to make a profitable product. As long as the media is pricey and not backwards compatible with pervasive existing equipment, it's going to be a tough sell. Let's remember that 5,000,000 PS3 units sold in the US (reasonable for year or so of sales) translates into about 4.5% market saturation (assuming about 110 million households in the US). That's pretty puny compared to 82% market saturation for DVD, a product that by and large, consumers are very happy with. Heck, with 15 million PSPs out in the wild, Sony couldn't make UMD stick.
Microsoft is already showing that Hi Def downloads that take advantage of more modern compression methods are possible on the higher end of the consumer bandwidth scale. The quality isn't quite as good as a $30 frisbee, but that's not going to swap most consumers. They can get the movie or TV show they want, when they want it, and for the price they want it.
Half-right. The MS xbox on-demand stuff uses the same compression as HD and BD - VC-1, there is no substantial difference in algorithm.
The difference is mainly in the resolution - HD and BD are both 1920x1080, while the xbox stuff is only 1280x720 which is roughly half the pixels. Sacrifice a little quality that most people won't readily notice anyway and you've got that 15GB 1080p movie down to a pretty decent looking 5GB 720p version. The pirates have been doing the same thing for years now - taking full 1080p hi-def "caps" (usually in mpeg2) and transcoding them to 720p (usually in h264) that fit on one 4.5GB DVD. They tend to look pretty good, significantly better than the DVD version of the same film.
Great, but unless the DVR is supplied by your cable/satellite company the signal is not coming in digitally so bits will always get transcoded. Without CableCard support the DVR has no knowledge of how to decode the digital signal, the cable box decodes it and outputs analog which the DVR just reencodes. Cable company supplised boxes generally suck, so until TiVo gets CableCard support the majority of people will still be reencoding the digital stream.
Not for HD, it does not. There does not exist consumer-level gear that can perform analog capture and real-time encoding of HD material. None.
My father-in-law bought his wife an HP computer for Christmas that came with an HD-DVD burner.
I never claimed there was. All I said was that you need either CableCard or a company supplied box to do direct digital recording.
I was under the impression that the current generation of High Def discs haven't made use of the VC-1 technology yet? Last I heard, it was in the spec, but the discs were deployed with MPEG-2 compression streams. Not that it really affects my point.
:)
Thanks for the info.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Besides, I don't think you give consumers enough credit.
I work in customer service and tech support. I am aware of exactly how much credit I need to give them. Which is slightly more then my dog.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
What is the difference between a platform and a format?
Yep, plenty of HD-DVDs use VC-1. Sony's initial BD mastering software only supported MPEG2, but HD-DVD did VC-1 from the start. IIRC, Serenity, one of the first released HD-DVD's was encoded with VC-1.
The problem with that argument is that the PS3 is not a Blu-Ray movie player, first and foremost : it is a gaming system.
The fact of the matter is that, yes, there are more Blu-Ray capable machines at the moment. But what is of question is how many of those machines is being used largely for watching films. By contrast, every single XBOX 360 add-on is exclusively for watching films, as MS has explicitly stated that no games will come out this generation that utilize the add-on. When you keep that in mind, the supposed install base numbers look much closer. Beyond that, it must be recognized how tiny the numbers we are talking about anyway - neither of them are signifigant at all at this point in terms of mass consumers.
The truth is, the format war is far from over. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are both going to remain niche formats for quite some time. Just because Sony shoe-horned a Blu-Ray player into the PS3 that most of their target audience would have bought anyway, does not a format war win. Especially since PS3's are rotting on the shelves (my local BB has signs up all over saying, "WE HAVE THEM!" and the signs are actually getting dusty they've been up for so long...), their impact over the life of the formats just may not be that signifigant.
Remember the race between the turtle and the hare?
AE
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/11/ces2007_hddvd_bl u_ray/
And they already got screwed, because until a relatively short time ago, HDCP wasn't included as standard on a lot of HDTVs...
I think you're absolutely right about convenience vs. quality, though. People like to have great picture and sound quality, but once you're into a good film, it doesn't really matter that much. On the other hand, making people wait through several minutes of trailers and irrelevant foreign copyright notices before they get to the film, or making them wait months for the local release with the right region code to play on their player, those piss people off.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I am having trouble drawing an analogy from your stage example to video game consoles. But with the interactive capabilities of DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray Disc, doesn't this make them more of a platform than a simple video format such as ye olde LaserDisc?
and end up typing "almost three" instead. Happens all the time.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I pity those poor deluded fools who're buying this DRM infested shite. Till the day HD/BR is totally crax0red like DVD's, they won't get a penny from me. If they want to dictate what I can and cannot do with stuff I buy with my hard earned money, RIAA/MPAA can keep your HD/BR.
DVD is 480p at best. You'll get about 852x480 resolution. If your watching it from a 26inch sdtv from ten feet away you might not notice a difference but with a 60 inch or larger in the same distance you will notice a different between that resolution and 1920x1080.
Plus a "widescreen" HDTV and a blu-ray/hd-dvd simply translate the lines better. With a DVD you often lose usable picture real estate for dvd's not formatted to your sdtv screen. The 4x3 formatted dvd's lose information on the sides an you lose the original view of the movie.
Hmmm... Pie...
You are both wrong. DVD is 720x480. The original poster's claim that broadcast is 330 and VHS 240 are "lines od resolution", not pixel counts.
"Plus a "widescreen" HDTV and a blu-ray/hd-dvd simply translate the lines better."
Careful with your terminology. Lines and pixels are not the same thing.
I'm happy with DVDs. They look fine to me. HD is ripoff. At around 25gb a disc the gains are not worth the extra disc space. With other formats you had other benifits such as size, form factor and less moving parts. HD and Blue Ray discs don't offer any physical benefits that DVD did over VHS. A better picture for 5 times the storage space supported by an array of DRM infested hardware and software. I'll take the lower quality that I am used to for a more versatile, efficient and cost effective format that I can make backups of.
I was looking forward to a nice barchart or so, but the scale thingys are a bit confusing really. Some people (like me) don't give a crap about the words, we're just looking for numbers...woulda thought a bar graph was the perfect comparison tool myself.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I think that was a HD-DVD ROM drive. I looked over HP's offerings and they don't have a HD-DVD burner listed on their site at all, not even on the high end workstations (nice that they offer Linux versions , though..)
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
For the same reason someone can spend $1500 a month on a car payment and not be able to buy anything without a credit card.
Which they used to purchase the HD-TV...
People who are outspending thier income have the whole package - HDTV, HD Cable, flashy car, etc. etc. The PS3 comes at the end of that run, not the start. Why would it stop them to "use a credit card" when they probably have eight ot ten?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Blu-Ray used single-layer BD discs (25GB) with MPEG-2 until about September or so. That's why their initial reviews were so horrid. HD DVD has been using VC1 since day one, IIRC. A new version of the VC1 encoder was developed recently, so improvements are still coming.
Note that Good Night and Good Luck fit on a single-layer (15GB) HD DVD and looked pretty good.
Now they're both using VC1 and/or Sony is using dual-layer discs (50GB) so the differences have disappeared.
Then there's MPEG-4/AVC/H.264. That's also being used in the occasional title (by Blu-Ray IIRC).
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
If you watch them in a normal TV, then yes.
I watch both TV and DVDs in a 19" CRT display, and the DVDs look much better. You can also buy one of those expensive HD TVs.
When I see a normal TV all I can think is "that screen looks way too fuzzy/blurred".
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Wasn't that a circut city dvd that you had to attach to your phone to authorize....
/regular dvd disk will be popular.
I'd forgetten.....
The problem to some extent is that consumers still want this stuff. When I get a HDTV, I'll be torn. I'd like High Def, but I'd also like to take my videos with me on my computer (DVD rips).
Hopefully blu-ray will include a mini version on the disk, or those hd-dvd
-Aram
Despite all the hype surrounding HD-this and High Resolution-that, there hasn't been a major push by consumers to move to the new High Definition televisions.
This is really inaccurate. In the United States, HD market penetration has gone from almost nothing five years ago to pushing 20-20% now. Last year, HDTVs accounted for something like 40% of TV sales, and the majority of sales by revenue. That's "major push" if you ask me.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The online TV revolution is still a ways away, while HDTV will be pushing major market share (over 1/3) in only the next few years. The number of people who are set up to take advantage of video-download services is minscule. Only a fraction of people have TVs near their internet connection, and virtually nobody is set up with a media-center PC. Not to mention the fact that although broadband penetration is up to 74% now, only a tiny fraction of that is fast enough to reasonably use TV download services. I've got an 8mbit connection, for which I pay Comcast a dear $70/month. For me, TV or movie download is acceptably fast (5-15 minutes), but far from video-on-demand. For most of the internet-using population, who are using connections that are a couple of megabits at most, the wait times of up to an hour for a single show are unacceptably long. And of course, unless you're using Usenet or Bittorrent, there is almost no content. iTunes' TV selection is feeble (and the quality isn't that great either).
No, over the lifecycle of Blu-Ray anyway, getting an HDTV to watch the "big game" in high-res is going to be much more popular than dealing with the trails and travails of online video.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
My (admittedly dicey) prediction from eight months ago, that Blu-Ray would become the clear standard within one year, based on keyword analysis Dejanews.com -
r y=blu_ray_vs_hd_dvd
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?ent
When it comes down to it, I would rather pick a Blu-Ray disk over an HD-DVD disk, if the disk was the ONLY factor in the choice. Blu-Ray is superior to HD-DVD, yes. MPEG-2 is NOT superior to VC-1. End of story. To top it off, HD-DVD is cheaper to manufacture, as it's pressed with existing pressing hardware. HD-DVD is superior in its creation (win for the publisher) and its quality (win for the consumer) and its price (win for the consumer). Blu-Ray has more space.
To say that Blu-Ray trumps HD-DVD in a bunch of ways is simply ignorant. It doesn't add up.
However, when you say this: The real winner will be Internet ala carte providers, who give the consumers what they want, when they want it. Sony shouldn't fear HD-DVD. They should fear Apple iTunes.
You're absolutely right. The next Rupert Murdoch will be the man to create this service, and offer it at a reasonable price. The real question is that, knowing this, is that person going to be Steve Jobs? Will it be Bill gates? Could it be Google? Hell, it might even be Rupert Murdoch.
Will it be me? Will it be you?
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Oh, not to mention the HD-DVD is coming down in price really really quickly while BlueRay is still a milking cow.
Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
If you get a BD or HD-DVD player you can still play standard DVD's and CD's on them. These new media players are aimed at High definition displays and while the market for HD is still small at the moment it is rapidly increasing due to falling prices of LCD and plasma screens and this means that people who purchase HDTV's will want HD players and recorders as well. Typical supply and demand although there will be a great deal of market push.
15 million PSP's is not bad when you consider that the Gamecube and the Xbox were about 20 million over their life which was relatively short compared to the PS2 and while Microsoft lost about $5 billion, Nintendo made a nice profit. So far the PSP is making a profit.
As far as being happy with DVD's well you can easily put a 2 hour SD movie on a single sided disk but try and backup a 300GB disk drive and you start getting to the same problem people had with floppies. I will admit even a 50GB Blueray disk is not satisfactory but at the moment super DLT tapes or even HVD's are not cheap and that does not count the recorder. This is going to be a huge problem especially if you want to future proof your backups (ie. off-site backups), but this is a topic for a future debate.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
What remains to be seen with this, and we won't know until Summer at least, is what effect PS3 owners are really having on these figures.
Right now, a fair number of people are buying PS3s. Sure, the numbers are pretty bad when your competition are 360 and Wii, and terrible in comparison to the number of people who are still buying new PS2s because that's perfectly good enough for them. But something like 95% of the entire Blu-Ray player market, regardless.
But it's a fairly multipurpose device; who knows why people are buying them? It could be a repeat of the UMD fiasco; i.e. with so few games worth playing on the machine right now, people might be buying movies just so they don't feel like they've completely wasted $600. Conversely, others are buying them deliberately as movie players (it's the cheapest Blu-Ray player by a huge margin, and even has better image quality than the Samsung standalone), and don't particularly care about games.
So this may be a permanent lead. It equally might drop right off as soon as there are some games to play other than Resistance and the Gran Turismo demo.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I don't think you truly understand what Sony has in mind for the PS3. It plays games sure, but it is also a very capable Blu-Ray / DVD / CD / SACD / MP3 / H264 / AAC / ATRAC player, and doubtless soon enough will do downloadable movies & IPTV. You might buy it for games (though some people obviously bought it as a cheap BD player), but Sony very much intend the thing to be a multimedia & entertainment center. They are also very much using the thing as a vector to increase their markets for HD TVs, Blu-Ray movies, downloadable content as much as they are for games. This is why it's a bit strange when people single it out for games. It means profits in all sorts of other ways for Sony.
The fact of the matter is that, yes, there are more Blu-Ray capable machines at the moment. But what is of question is how many of those machines is being used largely for watching films. By contrast, every single XBOX 360 add-on is exclusively for watching films, as MS has explicitly stated that no games will come out this generation that utilize the add-on. When you keep that in mind, the supposed install base numbers look much closer. Beyond that, it must be recognized how tiny the numbers we are talking about anyway - neither of them are signifigant at all at this point in terms of mass consumers.
Incorrect. The very fact that Blu-Ray sales are triple HD-DVD has very much to do with the fact that the PS3 contains a player built-in. It has very much to do with the fact that even some people bought the PS3 as a cheap Blu-Ray player and not just a console. Clearly the attach rate is higher for Blu-Ray or sales wouldn't have shot up so high. That people are not required to buy some monstrous strap on for their 360 to do it which in itself would put a lot of people off the idea.
The truth is, the format war is far from over. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are both going to remain niche formats for quite some time. Just because Sony shoe-horned a Blu-Ray player into the PS3 that most of their target audience would have bought anyway, does not a format war win. Especially since PS3's are rotting on the shelves (my local BB has signs up all over saying, "WE HAVE THEM!" and the signs are actually getting dusty they've been up for so long...), their impact over the life of the formats just may not be that signifigant.
Blu-Ray has uses outside of movies for consoles. For starters it makes games harder to pirate and distribute. Secondly it means games can contain more content, or more locales, or be more optimal for better gameplay. And by using Blu-Ray for games Sony lowers production and distribution costs for Blu-Ray movies since they are made on the same kit. Sure, the PS3 may have been able to scratch by without a Blu-Ray drive but next gen consoles really need the extra space anyway. 360 apologists might claim different but all those high def textures, polys, FMV have to fit somewhere. Either it goes on the disc(s), or you download it (i.e. screw you 360 Core owners), or you download it and pay for it (screw you all). Microsoft's own Blue Dragon game comes on 3 DVDs if you can imagine that. So while Sony obviously pushed for their own format, consoles really need it anyway.
The truth is, the format war is far from over. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are both going to remain niche formats for quite some time. Just because Sony shoe-horned a Blu-Ray player into the PS3 that most of their target audience would have bought anyway, does not a format war win. Especially since PS3's are rotting on the shelves (my local BB has signs up all over saying, "WE HAVE THEM!" and the signs are actually getting dusty they've been up for so long...), their impact over the life of the formats just may not be that signifigant.
People complain when Sony can't provide enough consoles. People complain when they can. You can't have it both ways. Besides I don't walk into a superm
Seriously, looks and smells just like a smallish digital reciever (as used in the UK at least) but instead of sucking TV through the aerial it'd just have an RJ45 jack at the back. All that's left to the user is to plug that into their modem/router/etc. This box would then operate like the Venice Project's GUI probably but the killer would the taking out of the loop the PC. I have no desire to run cables around my house so i can play movies and tv shows on my PC upstairs and shuffle them over to my TV and i dont think the Wife will be too savvy at finding, downloading and codec-hunting just to get the darned things to play. i want the box to do the lot, even allow you to pick 8 shows to "buffer" overnight to be viewed tomorrow instantly as well as stream what you want to watch now. And being networked up it too could act as a P2P client for the rest of the network. All seamless and only requiring me to plug in three cables: power, network, SCART.
Tivo and Sky+ are great steps towards this but they still rely on someone else's decision on how to use the available bandwidth (i.e. linear tv scheduling)
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Perhaps less time chasing pirates and instead concentrating on content is the way to go...ya think?
> save for the early adopters
This is interesting. So far, every major upgrade in audio or video quality/convenience has been picked up by pretty much every end user. Records -> tapes -> CD, VHS -> DVD. There is a vast difference between the quality of audio systems, from the cheapest Korean knock off tinny speakered all in one to hi-end audiophile discrete components. In TVs, the difference is far less. There are good TVs and bad ones, but a more expensive TV will not give you a much better picture than a reasonably priced one. It's usually better designed, has more features, but the image is the image is the image.
My point is that with BR/HDDVD and HD in general, the end users may not all move to this new system because they don't care, it's less convenient, too expensive, etc, resulting in more quality spread over the end users. Some will have a small TV with a couple of iTunes shows, some will have a large 7.1 surround with HD LCD setup in their basements, just like it is with audio systems now.
I have two PVRs, one a couple of years old and a second bought just before Christmas. Neither produce a noticeable drop in quality compared to OTA viewing. Furthermore, the older one has a 40 hour capacity and the newer one over 100 - seeing as I use these boxes for timeshifting *not* archiving (I have a DVD-R for that), capacity is not a limitation.
On the matter of direct broadband streaming - maybe one day. It's been a dream for years - I have a New Scientist article discussing a trial of VoD from nearly ten years ago. The simple fact is that to stream HD-quality material in real-time to every house where people are watching TV at the same time would demand servers and bandwidth with many, many times the capacity available today. But who knows, maybe that's what Google will use its new data centres and dark fibre for...
I know they deny it, but denying it is the plan to SHOCK Sony!
I bet they already are making 10000/week to fill the oil tankers!
The group of companies behind HDDVD should be damn scared of the ps3, and they should be willing to pay MS $250m to get
hddvd out there to compete. Im sure they can subsidise MS down to dvd prices and get it out there pronto together with
the hdmi + 60gig HD.
Seriously, how much can a HDDVD cost with the casing/cables and just bare bones internal.
I said over a year ago MS will make an itunes style store to sell music/videos on xbox live and they have. If MS wastes millions on a crappy
zune player, they cannot let hddvd just sit there not being 'standard' in the xbox.
They are already in the black on making the xbox360s, they can either drop the price or increase features.
This format war is BIG and long term... It might as well be the 'last format war' since theres no need for anything past this except tiny star trek crystals.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If you have a house fire or a tornado or a horroricane, or theft, or damage...
what will you replace it with.... DVD or HDVD? insurance company pays... choose hd.
RAW PCM audio helps too, no more compressed dolby/thx.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
LOL, I understand exactly "what Sony has in mind", but I just don't think that translates well into reality. You didn't need to go over the marketing PR with me - we all know it. The question is - do people care, and or want it?
It's not strange for a game machine to be called one. The system comes with a game controller, all accessories are for playing games...Sony may want to make it a "media hub", but until it can replace a TiVo I don't think the mass majority of the public gives a rats ass. The essential, main function of a PS3 is to play games, no matter what Sony has promised you in the future. The point is, yes, Sony wants to make it more, but the question posed was, how many of those gamers are big Blu-ray software buyers, and how many bought it for the gaming features. Sony's online is a joke right now, so all that pie-in-the-sky stuff you are talking about is just that - Sony's dreams that have yet to materialize.
So yeah, PS3 is just a gaming machine right now that also plays Blu-Ray movie discs. People make this big deal about more of them than HD-DVD players, and my reason for posting was to point out that EVERY SINGLE HD-DVD player sold has been for watching movies (the XBOX 360 add-on or stand-alone player). The same CANNOT be said for the PS3. That's why I don't think it's fair to say, "Blu-Ray is winning because there are more Blu-Ray capable players." The answer is - we just don't know.
I don't think that logic follows. A minute number of stand-alone Blu-Ray players has sold (25K was the last number I heard), and I just don't see PS3 sales as de-facto evidence that Blu-Ray is winning. Of course Blu-Ray sales jumped after Christmas, because I'm sure some new PS3 users were out buying software. But will it continue? Or were they just looking for something to use the PS3 for in between decent games coming out? There were very few Blu-Ray players before a Christmas, and so of course the software will see a jump from initial adopters. It's not hard to be impressive when you start with essentially zero. There was a surge in software, but what remains to be seen is if it lasts or if it was just people buying between games.
LOL, Sony has really sold you, haven't they? It's clear I'm having a discussion with a fan - for the record, I own neither an XBOX 360 nor a PS3. It's clear you understand the company line that Sony wants people to believe; problem is, just because they cross their fingers and wish real hard doesn't mean it's going to come true. You really believe all the hype, huh?
You lost me with your "more secure and less easy to pirate" comment. Yeah, I hear consumers say all the time, "Gee, this format is more advantageous because it cannot be backed up, copied, or pirated!" The only people who are happy if it's "more secure" are the people making money off of it - it's certainly not a selling point fo
There's no way that there's as many as 3 Blu-ray discs sold per week.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
On the other hand, the people who end up calling tech support are quite often not the most adept when it comes to technology. So your sample is hardly representatory.
Has either format yet reached the market penetration of the laserdisc format? Because that's pretty much the only segment of the population that will be interested in either for the forseeable future: audiophiles.
Give me a break. It ain't easy opening the store at 8AM after an all-nighter consisting of water bongs and Chee-tos while pondering the futility of life with my friends. That sign just ain't a priority, man.
++Om
On the third hand I mostly handle sales of phone products and that is a more accurate cross section. :)
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
As fios rolls out, this will quickly become an option. For $90 a month, I can get 50Mbps down.
50Mbps * 3600 (s/hr) = 180,000 Mbps = 18 giga bytes per hour... Thats twice what you proposed for a reasonable price.
Currently I have the cheapest fios option, $35 per month for 10Mbps down. They also have $45 per month for 20Mbps down. The box on the side of my house is capable of providing 1,000Mbps down & up, though they do not offer any packages that would use this at the moment.
There's a simple answer: HD-DVD has porn. HD-DVD cannot lose. The odds are this will play out much like DVD+R/DVD-R rather than betamax/vhs, and both formats will end up playing in all the players. But if that doesn't happen, then the outcome is predetermined. In short, they could tie, but HD-DVD will not lose.
Somebody needs some lessons in boolean arithmetic.
But it's not just a gaming machine. It plays games, but people have bought it for playing Blu-Ray movies too. In fact videophile sites such as this rave about it. Whatever way you dice it, it is selling Blu-Ray discs and lots of them. As for TIVO, you're right it doesn't have a video input and it annoys me. I griped that the 360 didn't have an input and I griped that the PS3 doesn't either. But you can run Linux and MythTV and you can plug a USB TV adapter if you wish. So in fact you can use it as a PVR if you desire. It stinks that it doesn't do it out of the box, but it is doable.
You may correctly claim this is irrelevant to the mass majority but so what? If we're going to make comparisons to the TIVO, bear in mind that a TIVO series 3 costs MORE than a PS3. Is it entirely feasible that Sony could produce a USB dongle or a rev 2 that did include a PVR and still be cheaper than a TIVO with a machine that does so much more.
Absolutely, positively, INCORRECT. Sony did not SELL 1.8m PS3's...they SHIPPED 1.8 million PS3's. Many of them are sitting in stores, right next to the ones that were returned by many eBayers unopened because they eBay sales tanked. THEY ARE NOT SELLING. Period. End of story. Sitting there collecting dust. They are not coming in and going right out and then being restocked - they are just sitting there. You honestly are the first person I've seen with the balls to argue otherwise, because arguing anything but is like saying New Coke wasn't so bad.
Bollocks. Clearly they were sold and clearly Sony have manufactured and sold many thousands more since. Besides, MS claimed 10 million sold too, but guess what - they meant shipped as well and went through all kinds of verbal gymnastics to explain why sold meant shipped. Either way that's the only metric these companies have the ability to actually say with certainty. Just accept it and move on.
LOL, Sony has really sold you, haven't they? It's clear I'm having a discussion with a fan - for the record, I own neither an XBOX 360 nor a PS3. It's clear you understand the company line that Sony wants people to believe; problem is, just because they cross their fingers and wish real hard doesn't mean it's going to come true. You really believe all the hype, huh?
I don't own a PS3 or XBox 360 either so what's your point? I'm certainly interested in the PS3 but that's because I can see the potential for the system in all sorts of ways. It doesn't mean I'm going to queue up at midnight to get one though. Better to wait and see.
This is precisely what I was thinking. If I'd bought a PS/3 over XMas (or received one as a gift from a wealthy and generous friend), I'd be curious enough about Blu-Ray media to shell out for one or two disks just to see what all the fuss was about, especially considering the dearth of worthwhile games for it at the moment. However, unless the experience was so mind-blowingly amazing that watching anything else was worse than having my eyeballs injected with shit, I'd be unlikely to buy any more for quite a while afterwards (if at all) because they're rather expensive, and to be honest, I doubt that the majority of movies would gain enough from being in HD to justify paying extra for it.
IMO therefore, a lot of commotion is being made over what is after all only _two weeks_ of sales data that concerns a period just after XMas, when a lot of people got PS3s, and will naturally want to see what they can do with them.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Dude, I'm sorry, but I guess we just can't finish the conversation, because you are simply talkin' crazy and now you are bringing up whole other topics when your basic knowledge seems to be extremely adverse to reality. You obviously do not follow the industry, because the facts at the base of your reasoning are simply WRONG. There is no other word for it. I mean, you must not even read /. regularly. That's fine and all - not everyone needs to stay on top of such things, but if you are going to tell someone they are "completely incorrect" or that their simple facts are "bollucks", you really should know what the hell you are talking about.
Sony announced after Christmas that it had SHIPPED 1.8 million units. Go to their website - look at the press release. The wording was very exact. They did not SELL 1.8 million units. This is fact reported by every gaming site and many mainstream publications.
There have been dozens of articles about how poorly all this has been going for the PS3. Either you are blind or you do not read.
Here is an article about retailers having PS3's sitting on their shelves for a week or more (70% in this case!).
Here is an article (with nifty graphs and everything!) that explains how the PS3 on eBay market CRASHED...before CHRISTMAS! It was so bad that scalpers were returning them to the stores because they weren't worth the bother to ship because they were all over retail stores and, again, no one was buying them (nor are they now).
Here is an article that confirms that Sony shipped 1m units to the US, and less than 2/3 of them sold. You will also note that this article is also about analysts cutting predictions for the PS3 based on it's bad sales - there are again dozens on the topic if you search.
Finally, here's yet another article detailing just how slow demand is. Stores are stocked - people don't want 'em.
I didn't mean for this to turn into a PS3 sucks debate, but man, you are just so ill informed about this topic one can't communicate with you on the others. My only point, from the beginning, is that PS3 sales are not going to win this format war. You have gone on and on like a friggin' press release about all this peripheral bullshit regarding the PS3, and how I don't understand "what Sony intends the PS3 to be" - we can't have that discussion while you are so ill informed about how the PS3 is really faring in the marketplace.
You'll also notice that those articles are from a selection of times - one before XMAS, one right after, one in early Jan, one last week. Before you start saying that "X-site is wrong, blah blah" I encourage you to seek out the other news stories out there abou
http://s3.bitefight.ba/c.php?uid=25977
Hah, wow, you're quite the optimist. :) Basic broadband is available to, what, ~40% of American households? And FIOS is a mere fraction of this. Further, there are many cable companies who aren't even bothering with FIOS, instead betting on switched digital to solve their bandwidth problems.
In short, there is no way FIOS will have any significant effect on HD or the overall content distribution industry. The penetration is simply too low, and there's no way it'll grow fast enough to have any sizeable near-term effect.
I guess we just wait a month. If another million ship, it ought to be apparent that the previous million sold. My local Best Buy has two PS3 (60GB), one PS2, and about 20 Xbox360 boxes inside the locked cage. The first time I saw them with PS3 in stock, they had about 5 of them, and as I stood there, one of them sold and two others were being seriously considered. This was about 2 weeks into January. I'm sure it's different elsewhere, but I just don't see the "piles of PS3 boxes sitting on shelves gathering dust for weeks at a time". What is quite clear to me is that any store that does have piles of PS3 boxes sitting on shelves gathering dust aren't going to have any more shipped to them, so any units that ship in February quite clearly will represent units sold in January. So just wait a month. There will be new Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD sales figures out by then too, so the argument can continue without threat of any real resolution.
Broadcast "lines" are measure differently than in resolution - essentialy, it's the number of times you can tell black and white switching from each other. Due to Nyquist, that number is going to be half th resolution at best. So your "330" broadcast lines would require at least 660 pixels wide of resolution.
My video compression blog
You're damn right it is! Here's what I want to see on Blu-Ray, posthaste:
(hmmm...do you get the idea I want some freaking concerts?
I can only watch the Blu-Ray of Blazing Saddles so many times...though the desert scenes are drop-dead gorgeous...
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters