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Kmart Drops Blu-Ray Players
Lord Byron II writes "K-mart has decided to stop selling Blu-Ray players in their stores, primarily because of the high cost of Blu-Ray compared to HD-DVD (now under $200). They will continue to sell the PS3 for the time being. Will lower prices speed the adoption of HD-DVD in the upcoming holiday shopping season?"
Until the pirate community has made a decision, I'm waiting before I commit.
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Who the hell buys electronics at Kmart, anyway?
K-Mart is still around?
It makes sense, in a twisted kinda way. If you were the average joe who had no clue, which would you want? Something with an unfamiliar name, or something named with HD and DVD right in the title? What if that second one was around half the price?
Just a little bias in the article post: "They will continue to sell the PS3 for the time being".
1.) The PS3 is a Blu-Ray player, arguably the best, that's what I bought mine for.
2.) "Time Being" meaning to imply Kmart may drop the PS3 also? And not sell all 3 of the current generation game players? Not likely.
HD-DVD could win, but in general people are not buying quality 1080P HDTVs at Kmart, they are buying cut rate 720P stuff that doesn't look that much better with HD-DVD than upscaled DVD.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't good for Blu-Ray, but it isn't the sky falling either.
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People don't know anything about one format or the other, or even care, but they know HD is good and DVD sounds familiar and easy to use. HD-DVD was a great move because it leveraged the gajillions of dollars that have already been pumped into marketing "HD" and "DVD", and the familiarity that goes with both.
Yeah, but video on demand isn't going to happen for another 10 or more years. Remember, 1080p is something like 40mbps. Comcast currently tops of at around 6mbps. Just imagine the bandwidth comcast would need for even 20% of it's customers all streaming 40mbps on a Friday night for 2 hours. They would also need a multitude of servers that could handle streaming all that data out.
The per-user cost of the routers, servers, and set-top boxes has got to be well over twice as much as a blu-ray or HD-DVD player is now. I'm not saying it won't happen, it's just not there yet and I don't see cable companies as smart enough to figure it out.
Not for the immediate futher, but don't rule them out yet... Sony has lost this kind of match before, back in the Beta vs VHS battle. Seems they forgot the lesson learned then.
Will lower prices speed the adoption of HD-DVD in the upcoming holiday shopping season?"It means the lower cost and wider availability of a player, either player, will determine the outcome. Sony charged high prices and licenced their Betamax technology in the 70's, thus we had VHS as the eventual winner. Not learning from their prior mistake? No deja fubar?*
*fubar spelt that way for you anal types.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Rumor has it walmart will have the toshiba A2 hd-dvd for $98 on this friday
http://holiday.ri-walmart.com/?section=secret
Unless sony drops the price of their Blu-Ray equipment, Blu-Ray is dead in the water. Have they already forgotten BetaMax?
This is not a directly comparable situation. Blu-Ray isn't going to die because it lives in every PS3 that is sold. Even if all the other studios switch (and it will take a lot for Disney to lose face and switch) Sony will continue to offer Blu-Ray content for the forseeable future. Not to mention, Blu-Ray burners store more and are likely to be predominant in the storage arena unless the HD-DVD people start making cheap burners too. So on second thought, maybe it is comparable in the sense that it actually took Betamax a long time to die, twenty-seven years according to Wikipedia. In that length of time, chances are neither HD-DVD nor BluRay will resemble what we see today, if they exist at all.
Fact is, Sony had a chance to end this war before it started by compromising a bit and agreeing to use HDi/iHD instead of BD-J. Its hatred for all things Microsoft caused it to make a monumental blunder. And in snubbing Redmond, it couldn't even come off as a champion of the people because of the extreme "Sony Style" DRM built into Blu-Ray.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Huh. I can go down to Costco and pick up a name brand 42 inch 1080(P!) LCD HDTV that actually does have 1920x1080 pixels, for just over a thousand dollars. It has HDMI and all sorts of other connectors out the wazoo. HDTV is not out of the range of as many people as you think, and the situation has improved 100% over last year. When I go for a walk, I'm always seeing a new shiny, new wide screen monitor through someone's window, where there was none before.
It's a funny thing. When you become a landlord, you notice that people you think would be desperate enough not to want to pay $60/month for cable ALMOST ALWAYS DO--and they almost always prefer to neglect everything else but the cable TV bill. Back when I owned real estate, I used to cut my poorer tenants slack. I'd pay the water bill so they wouldn't let my lawn die. I pitched in on the electricity and gas because I couldn't see them living in the dark, shivering to death.
When I found out that oh, 80% percent (my experience) of the people in this situation in life would rather have deluxe fucking digital cable TV than running water, or heat... I lost all sympathy. I mean, this was at a time where I just got basic cable six months before, because it was like $3 more after I got the internet package from Comcast. I will not ever pay that much for freaking TV. So, anyway, I kicked their asses out and eventually sold my rentals. They now live in cold, dark closets of apartments and I'm much happier.
Lesson is, if people slowed down on the Cable, starbucks, restaurants and other money pits in their lives, a vast majority of them could afford nice things. Maybe it's not some strange coincidence that lots of people who aren't good with money end up the low person on the totem pole?
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Does that mean it's going to win? No. But it certainly doesn't sound like it's losing.
Are you %*#(ing serious?
Video downloads on the 'net are typically offered at VGA resolution, if not less, and are almost always compressed to hell.
iTunes does it. Netflix does it, and as far as I know, so does Amazon.
If you want a comparison of just how much bigger a 1080p image is than a typical VGA download, look here. Oh, and the smallest box in that image is more than twice the size of a YouTube video.
An HD-DVD or Blu-Ray disc holds something like 20-40GiB of high-res video. 99% of broadband connections today cannot stream that much that quickly, and even a download would take prohibitively long, and be incredibly cumbersome to store due to the huge size of the files. I'd daresay that the internet backbone couldn't handle those sort of loads even if HD streaming became commonplace and there was broadband connectivity to support it.
Streaming's cool, but removable storage is going to have the edge in the video market for the foreseeable future if it's HD we're talking about.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
1. I swear if I hear another stupid VHS/Betamax argument again I'm going to shoot someone (although it's not as bad to the stupid dumbasses who say, "The winner will be whoever the porn industry sides with!! Ignoring the fact that the porn industry played only a part in that war - it was NOT the deciding factor)
2. With everyone saying, "Oh man, a sub-100$ HD-DVD player, that's going to win the format war for sure!!" I think there is one thing that people are forgetting- HIGH-DEF is not yet for the masses. Less than half the people in the country have HDTV. That will change after Christmas, but it hasn't yet. It is a premium item. The people who do buy HDDVD/BLURAY are people who can afford the premium (typically). This HDDVD player is the "Coby"/knock-off brand of HDDVD player (Yes, I know Toshiba is not a knock-off brand..). This is a 1080i player, not 1080p. Many people can't tell the difference, but people who can afford HD typically care. Nobody spends 1000's of dollars on a system to add a 100$ player. Until HDTV's are cheaper and get near the 500-700 range for a 42" or above instead of around 1000-1400, then HD player prices will matter. This one player, (which is only going on sale for a few days, this is NOT a permanent price fix) is not going to win the format war. It will convince some people to get one and a few movies (despite that the 5 movies that come with it really suck donkey balls.) This will help the HDDVD camp for bragging rights for a few weeks, and their sales MIGHT top Bluray for a while, but this player will not "win" the format-war.
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I wonder when this battle over formats is going to end so I can actually start buying HD movies. Seriously, it's very annoying. I certainly don't want to invest in a player until a winner emerges. I don't do TV, can't stand almost all of it, but I like my movies and SF shows (Mmmm, River Tam in HD..), I'd rather like to have more than three episodes per disc too, whole seasons even. For that I would happily re-buy much of my collection.
As for data storage? Well I'd love to get with that, but again, there's no way I'm getting a writer until two things happen
1: Someone wins this spat.
2: Whoever wins decides they've tapped out the 'adopt early and pay big coin' brigade, and prices for writers drop to something reasonable.
I agree with you. I want HD movies, but am not going to buy anything till a format is chosen. I am not buying DVD's right now, because I don't want to buy them then replace them with HD versions once we have a winner. Of course, the MPAA probably thinks sales are down because people are pirating everything
With your second point in mind... Not everyone is going to go out and drop "1000's of dollars" for an HDTV. In fact, the masses will probably go out this holiday season and buy TVs mostly using 720p instead of 1080p. Why? Price and marketing. These TVs fall into that 500-700 dollar category that seems to be the sweet spot for most buyers. Also, that 500-700 dollar set also has the magic letters HDTV on it, which most people will just look for that instead of 480p, 720p, 1080i, or 1080p. The people that will be looking for these players at KMart will fall into this category.
If you'd just do what we tell you and quit yer gripin' everything would be chocolate sprinkles and rainbows! -AC
I haven't yet decided which format I'm going to choose for my upcoming home theater purchase, but reading reviews it is certainly evident that writers insert their own bias when reporting on the format war. This submitter is no exception.
For example the submitter writes: "K-mart has decided to stop selling Blu-Ray players in their stores ... They will continue to sell the PS3 for the time being". The last sentence implies that they may at any time stop selling the PS3 as well. The original article however states "Of course, Kmart will continue to sell the Playstation 3, which includes a Blu-ray player", with the 'of course' implying that it's obvious that dropping the PS3 would not even be a consideration. The difference in perspective is obvious.
Now lets say the the submitter was an actual journalist in a mainstream publication. You could then easily imagine other people picking up on that inference and stating 'K-Mart drops Blu-Ray - considers dropping PS3 as well" or something along those lines.
For all submitters, if you are going to post something, keep your own agenda out of it.
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