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Wal-Mart Begins Massive Push For HD DVD

Posted by kdawson on from the 200-bucks-by-Christmas dept.

Several readers sent us word of Wal-Mart's ordering 2 million HD DVD players from China. Hans V wrote, "My kids work at Wal-Mart and the manager there has been talking about this. HD-DVD's are selling like mad there so I hear." Another reader sent us a few links in Chinese and summarized them this way: "The first batches of these blue-laser HD DVD players are to land sometime in 2007, with complete fulfillment of the order [from Fuh Yuan] in 2008. The deal could be worth up to $300 million US, which translates to $150 per player. If so, by the time Christmas 2007 rolls around, Wal-Mart could be selling these for less than $200 retail, although some speculate that the initial manufacturer suggested retail pricing might be in the ballpark of $299. Currently the cheapest high-definition player is a Toshiba HD DVD with an MSRP of $399." By comparison Blu-Ray players, manufactured in Japan, are not expected to drop below $1000 until next year. The International Herald Tribune writes about the risk Toshiba is taking by bringing in Chinese manufacturers to trump Sony in the format war.

1 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We have a winner! by brandond1976 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes, but you forgot to mention other facts about some of those companies:
    Apple - Makes DVD Studio, which includes support for making HD-DVDs
    Dell - Only cares about data, not movies
    Hewlett-Packard - Only cares about data, not movies
    Hitachi - Only cares about data, not movies
    LG - Released the first combo HD-DVD/BluRay player (which they have promised to update with better HD-DVD support).
    Samsung - Recently announced that they are going to be releasing an HD-DVD player for the holidays.
    Warner Bros. - Releases on both HD-DVD and BluRay, but is only releasing many of their most popular movies (including the Matrix trilogy) on HD-DVD due to the lack of interactivity available on BluRay players.

    Sun - Only involved because they managed to get Java into the BluRay spec. Some of you may know what a pain it is trying to release Java programs that work well on different versions of the JDK. Well, guess what, it's even worse on BluRay. Read this link to find out how much fun it is for the studios trying to use BDJ, they end up writing the same thing 8 different ways in the hopes that one of them will work in the version of Java on your player: http://www.blueboard.com/bluray/qa_dragonslair.htm If this is any indication of what will be required of them then I imagine that most of the BluRay studios will soon be jumping to HD-DVD.