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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."
Previously, I had heard that the total sales for blue ray players included sales of PS3 consoles. Are they included in these numbers as well? I know that there are certainly people out there who bought PS3's with the intention of playing PS3 games, and didn't really care that they could play blue ray movies as well.
That said, of course the loss of another studio from HD DVD to Blue Ray likely didn't hurt sales of stand-alone blue ray players, either.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
And as the article points out, the information from that week is useful to gauge sales for that one week only. Since Toshiba responded the following week with massive price cuts, the sales figures will be drastically different for the following weeks. Basically, these numbers will be all over the map for a while, and won't be useful for generating any sort of trend. That said, it is clear that HD DVD will be going away soon.
I, like I'm sure many other average-joe consumers, have been just WAITING for the decision to be made before going out and spending hard earned cash on a high-def player.
Warner Brothers moving to BluRay, along with rumors of Universal and Paramount possibly following suit, have really been a good sign.
I bought PS3 (and Rock Band!) pretty quickly after the news came out.
During the week following Warner's announcement -- a period in which the HD-DVD group went into hiding while they regrouped -- FUD went absolutely rampant. Eclipsing the damage of Warner's announcement were rumors from so-called insiders that Paramount and Universal were also jumping ship, along with the standard claims that the adult industry was going blu. If you do a news search on HD-DVD right now you'll continue to find the same FUD, blown into a life of its own by blogger referencing blogger referencing blogger, repeating the same disproven claim.
In this vacuum of information, there's no surprise that HD-DVD sales collapsed, and it isn't because of the loss of Warner's catalog.
Since then the outcome is much less certain, however. Toshiba hasn't just conceded (and they shouldn't -- just prior to Warner's announcement it was 50/50), but instead they've come out swinging, dropping the price of their units by half (obviously it has to be cheap to compete with a format that largely was acquired for "free" as an added value of a game system). This price puts a very capable HD-DVD player with ethernet, HDMI, optical audio, and so on, as cost competitive with a decent upscaling DVD player -- and the Toshiba unit is a very good upscaling player. Add the 7 or more free HD-DVD movies that'll work forever even if HD-DVD dies, and a catalog of 1000 or so HD-DVD movies already on the market, it's a hell of a deal. If someone could hack this baby to be a media head unit it would absolutely own.
Reports are that sales have been absolutely massive, and Toshiba's campaign has been a success. Warner since has extended their HD-DVD support by almost a month, and other very positive rumors have circulated about HD-DVD.
Don't write HD-DVD off quite yet.
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. Worse, Blu-ray has so many consumer-unfriendly facets (cost, no combo discs, a standard that's still in flux, early adopters getting screwed, the nebulous DRM of BD+) that it winning can never be perceived as a consumer win. Yeah, I'm biased because I didn't choose a format to win based upon a game unit I happened to buy.
Oh, it's also worth noting that all three current Toshiba players (A3, A30, A35) have been in the top ten at Amazon since the price cut.
One of the rationals of doing an external player was so that they could just make a blu-ray addon if HD-DVD didn't win. The main difference is that blu-ray and the PS3 are intimately intertwined. However, the 360 is just a video game machine that you can buy an add-on movie player too. Very few people (that I know of) bought the 360 as a movie player, compared at least, to the apparent many that bought the PS3 for its movie ability. So for all intent the HD-DVD addon, will suffer the same fate as a standalone player, and have little affect on the 360.
When my DVD player burns out, I'll buy an HD player if it's the same price and plays my existing DVDs. After that, maybe I'd buy some HD discs. Otherwise, I'll just keep waiting. That's the attitude of 99.9% of consumers.
Advice: on VPS providers
I pretty much did the same thing, I bought the PS3 mainly for the Blu-Ray. Why is this having "a lot of cash to burn"?
I wanted a Blu-Ray player, and the PS3 was only $80 more than a pure player, and it got good ratings on the quality of movie playback. I figured the extra $80 was worth getting a game console and media center thrown in. Seems like good economic sense to me.
$200 players are still having a hard time compared to the new and finally coming into its own PS3s for $399. Yes, it took a long time, but the PS2 also took about a year or two to really take hold as well, if you remember. As it is, you can have your HDTV compatible player and a gaming box all in one package. Plus, the resale value on a PS3 is also surprisingly high, often 75% of what they sold for new.
And there's talk of a PS3 without a hard drive and a few less features for even less money in the future(reminds me of the PS2 "slim" model release). Sony ended up making the right choice here as it forced people to buy the player as well with the console and lock millions of people into Blu-Ray.
IMO, it was the computer crowd that finally pushed it over the edge to win it. Blu-Ray burners and media can be found fairly easily, and with the backing of most of the computer giants as well, it was only a mater of time before it won out.
P.S. The actual laser assembly itself, which is what makes the drive different than a DVD drive aside from a few basic decoding chips and such *retails* for about $70. A $100 Blu-Ray reader should be no problem at all.(once analog TV is dropped in a year, it'll happen for sure)