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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.'"
Warner joins Blu-Ray. People think the battle is over. In response, HDDVD prices are slashed. Consumer's flock to HDDVD. Battle continues.
I'm really tired of this.
I think more than that's needed for HD DVD to "not fail", but it still results in good value hardware hitting the market that's worth the money regardless of whether it supports a standard that may not end up going anywhere.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Its too late. The writing is on the wall. With almost all studios having defected to Blu-Ray primary/Blu-Ray only, anyone who's been sitting out the format war to date is not going to jump at this.
Especially since, lets face it, you'd only care about Blu-Ray/HD-DVD in the first place if you drop $1k-2k+ on the TV itself, and another $200-1K on the stereo system.
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Seeing how most people still don't have an HDTV, they won't bother getting either an HD-DVD player or a Blu-Ray or a combo unit (if they even make these yet). Until that changes a cheapo DVD player works fine still. It's a start, but I think whoever gets a $100 player out first will win the war. (not on sale, but one that normally retails for $100)
which Sony and co have already said would not be happening, I only have a German reference right now (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/101796):
[quote]Hersteller von Abspielgeräten für das konkurrierende Blu-ray-Format erklärten derweil, sie sähen aufgrund des mittlerweile entschiedenen Konkurrenzkampfes keinen Grund, die Preise ihrer Player zu senken.[/quote]
Translated:
Meanwhile manufacturers of players for the competing format Blu-ray stated they wouldn't see the need to bring down costs of their players because the format war had already been decided.
Who expected otherwise?
Make HD-DVD disks the same price as DVDs, or less. I don't care about getting a cheap player if the disks are going to cost me 25%-75% more for a movie that looks just as good (right now) on my TV as the cheaper DVD that I already own a bunch of players for.
Meh, it doesn't really matter at this point. Digital Distribution is going to end this format war a lot faster than Sony's or Toshiba's corporate posturing.
What studios are left...that matter?
"I'm in it to win it, and no limit is my home." - Snoop Dog c/o PvP Online (July 12th, 2006)
They can't actually tell the stores they'll be selling it at exactly $150, because there are laws against that.
Really? I'm pretty sure Apple does this with their iPods, Nintendo with the Wii, Microsoft with the XBox 360, Sony with the PS3, Canon with their cameras, and so on. Granted they appear to have pre-existing agreements with those retailers, but let's not pretend it's completely illegal.
It isn't about a price war, it's a format war. If I spend $150 on an HD-DVD player and that format dies next year, I have to buy a Blu-Ray player anyway. The money I spent on the HD-DVD player was a waste. This is where consumers have a problem. Generally competition is good, but eventually one format will win this battle and you don't want to be heavily invested in the losing side.
Finding other idiots on
I know many parents who still use VCRs regularly (like me!).
Little kids aren't clamoring for better-than-DVD quality. They don't care or know the difference, and parents aren't going to fork over extra $$ for it.
The difference is that if you pick Delta airlines over TWA, you can still fly from New York to Chicago (I don't fly often, let's assume that's correct). When you choose either HDDVD or BluRay, you are limited in what movies you can watch on which one. So if you buy HDDVD You can't buy Disney Movies, and if you buy BluRay, you can't buy movies from Universal (or whichever company is still left as HDDVD exclusive).
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
And that right there is the answer. Advertising decides everything. I don't think they advertised half as much as they should have for HDDVD, and this is why it failed. Not because it's technologically inferior, but simply because they didn't push it enough.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Because some people want the HD movies now.
Yes it may be orphaned, but these folks are getting one of the finest upconverting players available, that just happens to have thousands of HD DVD discs already available for it. If you think what Toshiba is doing it unethical, then how about what the BD group did by releasing 1.0 players that they knew might become obsolete so soon.
The current wave of HD video simply isn't enough of an improvement in quality to excite me. It's a fairly transparent game of marketing to try and jack up the basic price of plastic disks and give them more DRM.
Give me actual high-def - three or four megapixels. At the moment I'm walking past the demo screens and I'm having to check the labels to make sure it's actually hi-def and not just a good quality DVD.
Make me say "Wow!" and I'll pay this thing some attention.
Until then, I'm just not going to bother.
No sig today...
People keep quoting your above argument, but if you look historically, it is often backwards.
When did consumers make the move en-masse and DVD started outselling VHS? Not when the quality and content difference was there - it was there from the beginning. It was when the players got cheap!
When did the DVD+R/DVD-R/DVD-RAM war end? It wasn't when one media had innvation over the other - it was when the dual-format hardware came out!
Why did VHS beat out betamax? It wasn't cause of the Porn angle, that is an urban myth (do a Google search). The real reason? VHS media was cheaper both to acquire and to record on (consumers could record 3 hour long shows on 1 tape vs. betamax's 1 ).
Consumers don't think with their heads. They think with their WALLETS. If they see high def player A on the shelf and high def player B on the shelf, and one is 1/2 the price of the other, they don't sit around doing market analysis to see what content is available on each - they buy the cheap one. Then they buy stuff that works in the cheap one.
And if your content doesn't work in their cheaper player and they know that, it won't get bought.
If that's what you paid for your TV/Blu-Ray combo, you were overcharged for your television. By just slightly more than the production cost of a Blu-Ray player, I'd say.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Network Effects prevent fair competition in the market. see also Microsoft Office.
That's the rub though, isn't it? Blu-Ray as a spec was just about sealed and ready to go, then Microsoft cobbled together a consortium at the last minute, and pushed HD-DVD because they didn't get their lock-in goodies included into the Blu-Ray spec.
Now do realize that the customer in this format war was not you or I, or any other end-user of the products. Far from it, in fact. The real customer in this little format war were the movie studios. Put in that perspective, the movie studios chose what they believe to be the best deal, and the system I described worked exactly as expected. Studios chose what best suited their needs. We as the typical home viewers had little-to-no input into the deal because we weren't the target clients.
I think Microsoft/Toshiba got confused about who their real clients were as well. In their haste to rig the system in their favor, they thought that all they had to do was please the home viewer, and they'd be set... Sony knew differently after their Betamax experience, and went after the studios. The only part where we as viewers were involved included Sony's Blu-Ray-as-part-of-PS3, the marketing blitzes that purported to show widespread viewer support, and a lot of stuff behind-the-scenes we'll probably never know about. Of course, there was also the zealotry machines that each side fired up, by generating buzz about their respective products and letting those newly-minted fanboys (or at least ideologues) do the rest... and yes, both sides had them. In short, those who were passionate about either format were being used as tools, IMHO (both formats have DRM, both formats hold --roughly-- the same amount of info per-disk, etc). On a technical level, Blu-Ray holds a slight edge, but otherwise the average home user isn't going to know or care about one over the other, save for whatever money they've invested in the equipment.
If Microsoft put a HD-DVD player into the Xbox 360 as standard, and the HD-DVD consortium generated a shedload more marketing noise, things may have been different. But, MSFT already had Toshiba to do the dirty work for them, and the Xboxes are unprofitable enough as it is without adding the further cost of a full-on HD-DVD player to each unit.
~~
As per MSFT Office, the files are a standard in the business sense (though PDF is almost as prevalent nowadays), but not in any real technical sense. It's just another ordinary proprietary not-so-well-documented binary file set. The whole thing we saw during the '90s was less of a format war than it was a war of applications.
We're only beginning to see a rise towards a real document standard now - which is why MSFT is trying its level best to fight off ODF and replace it with their particular munge-up called OOXML (which IMHO is nothing more than a barely concealed software patent trap). Once the dust settles there, MS Office is liable to be the loser in either case, unless MSFT suddenly starts dropping the suite price to $50 USD a pop.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Curious... Why do you even need a Blu-ray or HD-DVD burner? If you're just distributing relatively short high-def videos like commercials, you could simply follow the Blu-ray HD-DVD standards for high-def video on a DVD-9, far, far cheaper, with length being the only drawback. As long as you're not making feature-length films, I don't see the need.
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