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HD DVD Prices Slashed By Toshiba
Hellburner writes "Hoping to stop the inevitable, Toshiba has slashed the price of entry-level HD DVD players to $150 — down from the previous $300. 'It's a half-empty, half-full moment for retailers, who could see a sales boost at the same time that some may be faced with price matching from holiday sales ... The theory: play up the acceptance by consumers who have already paid for HD DVD versus those who get it with something else like a gaming console, get more players out there--and dare studios to ignore those consumers. In addition to the sales cuts, Toshiba will launch major initiatives, including joint advertising campaigns with studios.'"
Toshiba can't actually set the street price at the store legally in the US. They can influence it with a lower price to the retailer. They can lower the suggested retail price, which many consumers expect the stores to match. They can offer rebates and coupons. They can't actually tell the stores they'll be selling it at exactly $150, because there are laws against that.
I wonder if they timed this partially because of the recent blu-ray admission that none of the existing players but the PS3 will play new movies shortly? They may suddenly have a much larger installed base of players-that-can-play-new-movies.
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Star Trek TOS: The Complete Series is on DVD/HDDVD hybrid.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Actualy, the ps3 has quite a few games rated 80% or above, something like 40. Toss in the upper tier titles like folklore, uncharted, and rachet, and it's got some nice stuff. the whole 'ps3 haz no gamez!' thing is pretty outdated.
Read this from the Firehose the other day. Seems that the BlueRay format was not and is not finalized yet. All 1st gen players aren't going to support the final format (which sounds an awful lot like HDDVD with internet connectivity) and they won't be able to be upgraded. The only player that will continue to work is the PS3. Talk about alienating customers. This makes me think that the war is far from over.
Especially when Disney is Blu-Ray exclusive
Only in North America. In some other parts of the world Disney titles (at least some of them) are HD-DVD, due to different agreements with local distributers. And HD-DVD has no region encoding.
-- Alastair
The BluRay version is 1000x better.
All the "extras" on the HD-DVD version that aren't on the BluRay version are the bits they cut out of the original to make more room for ads when they aired it on Discovery. The BluRay version has those bits integrated, and has narration by David Attenborough. It makes the HD-DVD version (and the Discovery Channel version) seem un-watchable.
Whatever store she bought it at will likely exchange it for you.
The cat is already out of the bag on that one though; users that have had the taste of a computer hooked up to their TV rarely want to go back to a regular plain DVD player and a TV guide. Before the HTPC, the computer was "separate" from entertainment because it didn't come with a sofa attached. Now with a decent wireless mouse and keyboard a users gets the sofa, the DVD player, YouTube, their email, wikipedia, family photos, recipes (what with most people having their TV within sight of the kitchen) and, of course, the aforementioned downloadable movies (illegal or otherwise). Modern LCD TV's are basically so indistuinguishable from computer monitors technology-wise they I've yet to see one without a VGA, DVI or HDMI port.
:)
I've set up seven people with media centres of some sort (MythTV, mac minis + FrontRow, one Windows media box plus a couple of bog standard PC's because they wanted to be able to use the web during the adverts without having to shuffle off to the "computer room") and there's no way in hell those people would switch back - they love it. If Big Content won't offer them stuff for their HTPC's, they'll either buy a $BIG_CONTENT_APPROVED device and use their HTPC, or just not bother with Big Content at all, not when there's so much other stuff available to compete for that entertainment space. Similarly, everyone I've set up with a PVR tells me how much less TV they watch - all the stuff they know they want to watch is recorded for them to watch at their leisure so TV scheduling doesn't become a factor in relegating other forms of entertainment to the back burner. Combine that with the fact that many PVR's come with a computer attached "for free" and the above factors come into play as well.
I'm not a USian, but we have similar (though less severe) problems here in the UK WRT to bandwidth; almost all of our last mile copper is still owned by British Telecom (but rented out at a flat rate to every telco, enforced by OfCom) and recently we've had a furore from the telcos over things like the BBC streaming their TV over the net saying "the pipes cannae take it, Cap'n!" whilst the infrastructure fails to melt (of course the furore is about people actually using more of the bandwidth they've already paid for but that's besides the point for the purposes of this argument). Similar situation of massive overselling of bandwidth and a reluctance to invest in fatter backbones (though thankfully most last mile copper is capable of being able to sustain at least 1Mbps downstream which is just enough to comfortably stream video without having to wait too long, more usually 2-4Mbps and I'm not aware of any large city that doesn't have 24Mbps available, but I'm spoilt living in London - no doubt there are people in the country who will inform me they're still forced to use dialup).
What's changed is that now Big Content isn't the sole denizen of the living room - users have the option of absolutely craploads of other entertainment avenues available to them as well. If it plays its cards wrong, Big Content could soon find themselves increasingly marginalised in favour of more accessible content.
Just my £0.02
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
If they really want hd-dvd to take off, they should try to get a very cheap burner out there along with affordable media. Then guys like me would recommend it to the parents, as there will always be ways for a kid to screw up a disc, and backing them up just makes good common sense. I know I'd be happy to buy one if I could get a burner at the right price, as the extra storage space would be good for OS images and backing up files before working on a machine. That's my 02c, anyway.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Have you actually tried to buy these burners? They still aren't available anywhere. Try going to any website that sells computer stuff and see if you can buy an HD DVD burner. One of those Toshibas was announced a year ago and still nothing. I'm beginning to think they will never come out, which is odd since HD DVD-R was available for sale since the beginning of 2007.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Why do people insist on whittling things down to one reason? I know it makes it easier to understand, but it also makes it less correct. There are multiple reasons for the adoption of this hardware, and Porn certainly did play a part in the uptake of VHS - no, it was not the only factor, or the most important, but it was a factor.