NPD Group Says "Wait! HD-DVD Isn't Dead Yet"

The NPD group, owners of the not-quite-as-popular-as-they-had-hoped HD-DVD format, attempted to battle back against the tide of "naysayers" who claim that the format war is over and have declared Blu-Ray Disc the winner. "While select articles have implied that HD-DVD as a format is doomed and the sky is falling for the format's supporters, the NPD Group this afternoon reinforced that sales results from a single week do not necessarily indicate a trend, and that the week in question had several intriguing variables that have gone unreported."

Comments

Bad Summary, NPD Doesn't Own HD-DVD

[rsmith-mac]

The summary is partially incorrect. The NPD Group is a research firm, they do not own the HD-DVD format or anything close to it. The closest thing to HD-DVD's owners would be the DVD Forum, which is a consortium of companies.

The reason NPD is involved in this is because they are one of the big research firms for tracking sales data. NPD is the firm that released the earlier reporting talking about HD-DVD hardware sales slowing and this is a clarification of that. They are pointing out that one week's results can not be extrapolated to argue that HD-DVD is dying/dead like many people did, it's too short of a time period in a week with several unusual variables.

Re:A Modest Proposal

[squiggleslash]

I'm trying to work out why the submitter thinks the NPD group has anything to do with HD DVD at all, let alone that they're the supporters. You appear to think the same thing. NPD is a market research firm. They, amongst other things, collect tallies of sales figures and pass this on to analysts and industry. They're complaining that various outlets misinterpreted their latest figures showing an immediate drop in HD DVD player sales just after the Warner announcement. One of those outlets was Slashdot, yesterday. They're not "supporters" of HD DVD, any more than they're "supporters" of Blu-ray.

Re:Essentially

[squiggleslash]

I agree both formats are probably dead, but not for the reasons you state:

1. Pricing isn't much higher for the media, only the Blu-ray players. HD DVD players right now are the same price as "ordinary" up-converting DVD players, so there's absolutely no reason to buy the latter in place of the former, even if you think HD DVD will fail. As for media: typically HD discs (I'm using that term throughout this for both HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs) retail for about 50% more than the equivalent DVD, despite often having better additional content and higher quality sound and video. (Note I put sound first, video in so many cases isn't noticeably higher, with some prominent exceptions.
2. Blu-ray and HD DVD players can play DVDs, so the bottom line is that you can buy either player and buy HD discs when they're worth buying and DVDs when they're not
3. Competition from the 'net is a factor, but right now only Apple has a device that "just works" and it's still at the teething stage. It's also rental only. Some of us like to buy discs
4. Your last point is just untrue. An 8Gb SD card costs a minimum of $50 at the moment, compared to a dual layer DVD-R which is generally much lower than a dollar. It's going to take a decade before we see 50Gb solid state drives for the lower than a dollar price (or 500Gb drives for less than $10, if you'd prefer), whereas three layer HD DVD-Rs and two layer BD-Rs will probably come in at that price within two or three years of the recorders becoming widely available. Hey, Toshiba, if you're still serious about HD DVD, start getting those recorders out.

Here's the more probable reason why both formats will likely fail:

The studios are largely backing Blu-ray. That means HD DVD will likely fail unless Toshiba can get a hell of a lot of players out in the next six months.

Blu-ray cannot succeed either. The players are expensive and unlikely to come down in price. Most of the players on shelves right now are obsolete. The only player worth getting is the PS3. The PS3 is sufficiently powerful enough that the upcoming changes to the Blu-ray spec are just a matter of updating the firmware. Many standalone Blu-ray players have no internet connectivity (required for recent Blu-ray spec changes), and nothing like enough storage capacity.

HD DVD, interestingly, doesn't have this issue. Much of the recent revisions to Blu-ray have to do with bringing it up to spec in capabilities to HD DVD. But the studios seem to be going Blu-ray. So it doesn't matter.

I don't think consumers are going to go for either. For Blu-ray to take off, it needs cheap players - sub-$200 before there's any chance of mass market starting to take off, with sub-$100 players to truly achieve DVD-like penetration. it certainly isn't going to work with $300-500 players that you already know you'll need to replace within the year. That'll piss people off, especially when they start playing DVDs and HD discs back to back and notice that the visual quality they paid $300 for isn't that dramatic after all. Oh, sure, 2001 and Blade Runner look awesome. But anything action based isn't, and who cares if a romantic comedy is high definition?