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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."
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.
I hear this line a lot. Why does it matter?
If you count the PS3s, then you also increase the denominator when determining the ratio of players to media purchases, the attach rate.
I think the only honest way to report on blu-ray is to include PS3s and accept a lower attach rate (if there is one). Frankly, most blu-ray players are PS3s, and it's simply an obvious selection for those who aren't interested in video games, so excluding it is insane.
I know of several PS3 owners. Some of them only have the free blu-rays. Fair enough. None of them are unaware of the HD disc abilities, but some just don't watch movies. The statistics reflect this reality, so I see no reason to adjust things strangely.
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.
Thus it's ironic that Blu-Ray is a much more open format than HD DVD. Blu-Ray interactive media is based on the Java language, which is going open-source (although BD-J-specific JVMs aren't yet), while HD DVD is based on the Microsoft-controlled iHD standard. Blu-Ray encourages the use of MP4/AAC instead of HD DVDs Microsoft-controled VC-1 (although both formats support both, the authoring tools for each push studios in specific directions). And the PS3, the most prolific Blu-Ray player on the market by far, has "install linux" as a menu item out of the box. Sony doesn't even hold the most patents on Blu-Ray, so the IP situation is more diversified.
Anyway, I never bought a memory stick or PSP-format game, but Blu-Ray seems to be closer to Sony "getting it".
E pluribus unum
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.
Even still the PS3 does offer more open standard support than their competitors. You can use Generic hard drives, generic bluetooth devices, generic memory units, generic usb devices, etc. while it's mostly proprietary on the 360 and Wii.
Sony's Biggest folly IMO is their abhorrent lack of organization both blu-ray and the PS3 in their release configurations were running on un-finalized specs, blu-ray is just now finalizing it's spec and basically obsoleting most of the early players, and disc releases and the PS3 still feels incomplete and probably wont feel "finished" until the release of home/full integration of the x-media bar. At least the HD-DVD spec was finalized and all the players and media supported that spec on day 1.
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