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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.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
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?
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
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
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.