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HD DVD Player Sales Grind To a Halt
Lucas123 writes "While the news may fall under the 'Duh' category, it's still relatively shocking how quickly the death knell for HD DVD player sales came on after Warner Bros. announced they were dropping dual hi-def DVD format support in order to back only Blu-ray. According to a Computerworld story, the week after Warner's announcement, sales of HD DVD players dropped to 1,758, down from 14,558 players the week before. In contrast, consumers bought 21,770 Blu-ray Disc players, up from 15,257 the previous week."
So, HD DVD lost 13,000 sales and Bluray only gained half that? I think maybe there's something else going on as well other than just the Warner deal.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I'm no crotchety old man pining away for the the good old days, but it seems to me that DVDs are still working just fine. The format wars are a sometimes interesting diversion, but until HD TVs are the norm and DVDs leave the market altogether, the format war is largely meaningless to most. My SD TV works just fine and until it stops working and/or HD comes down in price another $500USD or so, Blu-ray vs HD-DVD is a nonissue for many if not most. Oh, and that says nothing about digital delivery making physical disks totally irrelevant.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I have a 46" 1080p Samsung LCD with a 1080p upconverting DVD player. DVDs look fantastic on this equipment. I see no value in upgrading to either high-def format - especially considering the price of the media. When I can get a brand new DVD for $15 or a gently used one for under $10 and the high-def format discs are still $25 or more, color me uninterested.
I don't think that's it's a foregone conclusion that either format is going to win out. Look at what happened to SACD and DVD-Audio.
No the disc don't stop working, but when your HD DVD player does in 5 years they may as well not work.
As an aside, one thing that really pisses me off about this war are claims that the end of the format war would be good for consumers. This is as logical as saying that Windows and IE should be universal -- good for consumers.
That's not even remotely the same thing. We're talking about formats here - interoperability is the important thing here. The analogous situation wouldn't be a universal Internet Explorer, it would be a universal HTML format. The competition between web browsers is reflected by the competition between player manufacturers.
Do you think the world would be better off with a version of HTML that only works in Internet Explorer and a version of HTML that only works in Firefox? Because that's the type of situation here.
I didn't mean to imply that MS made a mistake by opting not to bundle the HD-DVD player with the 360. It was just pointing out why it was that MS made that decision, but Sony didn't. Essentially Sony was using the PS3 to boost Blu-ray sales and help out some of their non-gaming divisions. To a certain extent it's obvious why MS didn't feel particularly motivated to push HD-DVD. Even though they would profit some, being one of the backing companies for the format, not being a hardware manufacturer (to any real extent) they actually have little profit motive, and they also know that the biggest money maker on their console outside the games themselves is the online content of Live. Bundling a HD-DVD player would have just jacked up the price and reduced console sales. They would very likely never see an adequate return on investment from that strategy even if it had lead HD-DVD to dominate. Sony on the other hand, had they not bundled Blu-ray with the PS3 might have seen better sales of the PS3, but would take a hit selling Blu-ray DVD players.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Getting the PS3 for a Blu-Ray player is smart because not too many Blu-Ray players have ethernet connections to update the firmware, but the PS3 does.
I would have liked to see if these numbers were just for the US. What about worldwide where these exclusive deals don't matter?
Can I bum a sig?
Imagine if every media company released every disc in DVD, Blu-ray and HD-DVD (the cost to them is marginal.
And you have access to pricing figures for the studios to back up this "cost to them is marginal" argument, I would assume? Of course you don't. Such data is not published. Your are speculating out your wazoo, and you are wrong.
HD-DVD's most-trumpeted advantage is its ability to make use of existing DVD production facilities with only minor refits. No need to scrap the entire production line, you just upgrade it a bit. Blu-ray is fundamentally different in disc construction and has no such advantage. This was a conscious choice on the part of Sony. They sacrificed backwards compatibility of production equipment to get a more advanced disc structure. In this they have succeeded, as Blu-ray has scaled to 200GB capacities on an eight-layer disc in the lab. HD-DVD has scaled to 51GB with triple-layer discs in the lab. There is no comparison.
Studios that produce in both formats have to pay production houses to stamp them. The production houses have a choice of going exclusive with one format or gearing up to produce both.
The former situation requires the studios to negotiate separately with two production facilities, but (and here is the key) they're effectively splitting the number of discs produced in half for each facility. This hurts the studio's buying power just like it would hurt anyone else: more quantity equals lower prices. For disc production this is particularly acute because there is a very high cost to create the line to produce even one disc. The more discs you can stamp on that line, the cheaper it gets on a per-disc basis.
The latter situation requires the production house to foot the bill for two very different (and mutually incompatible) production lines. This is no small cost, and that cost is passed on to the studios when they order a run of discs.
So, no matter how you play it, your statement that "it doesn't cost more to do both formats" is completely without merit. It does cost more, more to author (HD-DVD and Blu-ray authoring tools are both incompatible and very expensive), more to produce (as outlined above), more to distribute (remember, two different kinds of packaging), and more to stock (there's only so much shelf space in stores).
This kind of lets the air out of your whole its-a-corporate-conspiracy argument, doesn't it?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky