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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.
Why does it matter? It's a dying format. Even if people jump on now, everyone's scrambling to get away from HDDVD discs! The real news will be when BluRay players are 150 bucks a pop.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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.
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.
We've had to contend with +r and -r for dvd burning and I honestly can't tell you anything about them other than +r seems to work better with my equipment. My burner can handle both and I'm assuming if both of these formats can stay viable long enough, burners, players, and even the game consoles will eventually support both. MS is already on record stating the 360 would be able to support a BR player due to it's current high def player being external. A lot of people bitched that it wasn't included like the BR drive was with the PS3 but I think in the end they made a smart decision to go external. If the format does fail then they can easily switch and probably a lot of the people that have bought drives would buy again to get the new format.
I really don't care who wins out or if we end up with both. I'm sick of needing to replace my movie collection every however many years. I had a crap load of vhs. I now have a library of films on dvd. Am I going to replace everything with the media du jour? No. I have too much money invested in the shiny discs I already have and I don't see those going away for a very long time. Most people I know don't even have a high def tv yet and according to the story yesterday regarding the uber def format the Japanese are working on, why should I upgraded to BR or HDDVD only to have to upgraded again to support the crazy resolutions of yet another format in 2015?
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
I have a hunch that movie studios are jumping on board with Blue Ray because they feel it's more secure. Which makes me ask, "Why haven't there been more stories about Blue Ray being cracked recently?" Anybody?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
My mother bought me an HD-DVD for the holidays, assuming for some reason that I owned an HD player. Now, this is a series that I wanted in HD (Planet Earth), but I was going to wait till this annoying format war was over. Now of course, a month later, the format that she bought me turns out to be losing.
Anyone know if there will be some way to exchange formats, should HD-DVD finally die out? Buying a hybrid player seems like an awful waste for a single dvd. Anyone else have a contingency plan to play HD-DVD's that they own?
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Those guys posted an awesome recreation of what is really happening at Toshiba headquarters.
Youtube clip via gizmodo : http://gizmodo.com/344885/the-downfall-of-hd-dvd-now-available-on-blu+ray
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
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)
I am going to purchase a Sharp HDTV later today and will be getting a free Sharp Blu Ray player with my purchase. Toshiba can cut prices all they want, you can't beat free.
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)
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've never heard consumers complain about price wars in the past... airlines, PCs, etc. Isn't that a big part of what capitalism is all about? While there are two competing solutions, since they have many similar features on a technical level, they're forced to compete on price. This tends to be GOOD for the consumer, at least in the short term. (In the longer term, it can be bad as lower margins can squeeze out smaller startup competitors in the field.)
That totally misses the point. We're talking *standards*, not *manufacturers*. Having multiple manufacturers who are competing for the exact same market is fantastic. But it doesn't help capitalism to have multiple standards; if anything, it fragments the market and makes competition more difficult.
Even then, IF players on the market could play either disc, then sure, competition between standards would be OK. But nobody likes hardware/disc incompatibility. Nobody likes buying a player that only gets half the movies released for it. Nobody likes having to have two damned disc players to make sure they can play what they want. And nobody likes buying a disc player whose maker loses the format war, meaning you spent hundreds of dollars for something that becomes a dinosaur in a year. Do you then go buy another disc player? Do you leave the player hooked up in your entertainment system forever even though it can only play the 5 movies you bought, or do you go re-buy those movies?
Basically, what's happening now is nobody wants to get caught up in the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray pissing contest, so a whole lot of people who otherwise would have bought a player by now are getting sick of the crap and want someone to win. That doesn't mean we want to see only one manufacturer making players; far from it. I'd like to see tons of manufacturers competing directly on the basis of a single standard. I'd like to get a better disc player than the one I have now, but I don't want to get in the middle of this crap.
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.
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.
I really hate moves like this.
This is simply taking advantage of mom 'n pop consumers who are just out to buy a nice birthday gift or something like that and don't read consumer electronics news sites.
There's probably nothing in particular that can be done to stop it. It's simply the strong taking from the weak, where in this case the weak are the uninformed. The current moral climate in the United States seems to accept that it is perfectly OK for the strong to take from the weak as long as there's no law against it, and as long as it only involves money. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless.
I wonder how many of the Best Buys of the world will be warning customers that the price drop is a firesale of a product that many think will be orphaned, and how many will be stacking 'em up by the checkout isles and selling them as hard as they can?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Because some people want the HD movies now.
Even if the item is on sale for dirt cheap, it still costs money to buy. I remember a story one of my professors told me. His wife comes back from shopping with a new $400 coat. When he asks why she spent so much money, she says, it was on sale, I saved $200. He said great. Go buy 4 more so we can pay the rent. The moral of the story is, buying something simply because it's on sale doesn't save you anything. It just costs you money.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
And if consumers buy enough HD-DVD players, they will switch to HD-DVD.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I remember looking at HD-DVD burners around the same time. It was about $600 for the Blu-Ray internal drive and it was about $1200 for an external firewire HD-DVD burner. Late spring/early summer 2007 I went to look at getting an HD-DVD burner as wedding season started. I figured the price of HD-DVD burners had dropped to the point where I could make a buck by offering the same service to others still not wanting to invest a $1000 in a burner, but still needed HD-DVD work. I could purchase the blank media at staples (both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD), which is saying something because it's a rural college town, not a big city.
So I went out shopping online and found HD-DVD drives for computers, but I couldn't find a single burner. I went to a couple specialist companies that sell high end editing equipment, and they didn't have any Pro-sumer grade HD-DVD burners (they had the high end stuff). Come to find out, the low-end/consumer/prosumer grade HD-DVD burners simply didn't exist. They weren't available.
That told me something right there. When people asked what format to buy this past christmas, I still said, "I think digital downloads is going to be the way HD-content is delivered to TV's. Whether that's Apple TV/iTunes, Amazon/Cable/Tivo/Sat. I don't know. My advice is to wait. But if you have to buy one, go Blu-Ray. I can burn Blu-Ray discs, I can't even find an HD-DVD burner.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Did your professor mention how comfortable the couch was?
New punctuation update "~" (no quotes) at the end of a line to indicate sarcasm. ~
It is. Competition is good also in ideas. In this case Blu-Ray, which is the technically superior format, won the war. Sadly, the fact that a Microsoft funded Toshiba continues the fight just means that we will have more senseless damage to innocent bystanders and no different outcome in the end.
In this battle Toshiba is Microsoft's paid assassin, and the only thing MS wants out of this is to make sure all disk-based formats fail and Microsoft's download formats win. If you think the DRM for Blu-Ray is problematic, just wait until you are forced to purchase a new PC with the latest version of Windows Vista or whatever virus distribution tool Microsoft creates next, every two years just to watch high-def movies.
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.
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?