HD-DVD and the Early Adopter Premium

Hodejo1 writes "The early adopter premium is the difference between the cost of buying the latest greatest techno-toy today and the cost of buying an equal or better unit a couple of years later for much less. That Blu-ray unit you buy today for $300 will cost $80 two years from now. The premium is the $220 you pay to get the starter Blu-ray unit now as opposed to waiting. The same applied for HD-DVD until the axe finally fell and this is where it gets interesting. MP3 Newswire has been tracking post-mortem HD-DVD sales on eBay and surprisingly found that there are many takers. And why are people flocking to buy this decade's Betamax? Simple, they did the math. The demise of HD-DVD format creates "an option where the consumer can get his high-def player NOW without paying the $220 early adopter premium. That savings pays for the player and more. New sealed boxes of the Toshiba HD-A3, which shipped last fall for $300, are now drawing on average about $75 on eBay, where plummeting HD-DVD movie prices are averaging between $6 and $10. "Take a consumer with a 42" plasma set who needs to replace a broken standard definition DVD player. He can a) replace it with another standard definition DVD for about $60. b) He can buy a Blu-Ray player for between $300-$1000. c) He can buy an HD-DVD unit for under $80 and then buy ten $10 or sixteen $6 HD-DVD videos for a total of $180". What really drives this is Blu-ray's skimpy catalog, which will take a couple of years to pump up. Rather than blow the $220 on the early adopter premium just to have access to a limited number of movies the post mortem HD-DVD buyers can enjoy cheap Hi-Def players, cheap Hi-Def videos, and pay less. These users can shift to Blu-ray when players are less expensive and the catalog is robust. Actually, the early adopter premium is more like $320. With the win, Blu-ray manufacturers have raised prices."

Comments

Re:Great Player

[MagicNegro]

I'm not feeling too bad about my purchase of a Toshiba HD DVD. I mean, it came almost free with the HDTV that we bought before Christmas, and aside from renting a few HD DVDS, we haven't really invested a whole lot of money.

It came with 2 movies "Bourne Identity" (love it, great action and good features) and "300" (artist self gratification and generally crap movie), and a coupon for 5 more free. Haven't seen them yet. Doubt I will. It won't matter.

We will be buying a Blu-Ray once the price point on a medium featured unit goes sub-$200. Typical consumer price.

Re:embellishment

[CastrTroy]

I don't think digital distribution will be a replacement for physical disks anytime soon. If you want to know why, take for example, the WiiShop channel on Christmas day, You couldn't even get on, let alone get to the point where you could download a game. And that's just for downloading tiny ROMS. Using physical disks allows studios to release a very large number of disks to the public, and have almost everybody who wants a copy, gets a copy. Digital distribution of 50 GB HD movies won't be feasible for quite a while. If everybody with a cable connection started to download 50 GB a month, the ISPs would quickly raise rates to account for the massive increase in bandwidth.

Re:Prior art

[glitch23]

In its way, rather similar to what happened with the 3" floppy disc drive.

Just as an FYI and future reference, "disc" is reserved for optical media while "disk" is for magnetic (hard or soft media). So if you have seen CD expanded to "compact disk" it is wrong as far as the nomenclature is concerned. And yes I am aware your ID is a lot lower than mine but when something is factually incorrect it is factually incorrect.

HD-A2 vs. *Quality* Upscalers

[DCheesi]

What all the "Wal-mart DVD players are cheaper" posters are missing is that the upconversion on those players is mostly crap. If you've got an HDTV that has good internal scaling then all you need is progressive-scan; but some displays *need* a good quality upscaler, and the Wal-Mart brands are largely worthless for that (heck, even the models sold in CC/BB are only mediocre, usually).

Personally, I bought an HD-A2 when the price dropped below that of the OPPO players, which are widely considered the cream of the crop in upscaling DVD players. Many reviews on AV discussion boards indicated that the Tosh HD-DVD players were(/are) at least equal to the OPPOs, plus you got HD-DVD as a bonus. Meanwhile the only thing I sacrificed was support for formats like DVD-A/SACD on the OPPO, which I didn't plan to use anyway.

Of course that was before the format "died", so there was at least the *possibility* that the HD-DVD portion would be useful going forward. But if I were looking at it now, I'd much rather have a $60 "HD-A3 than a $30 Wal-mart brand just for the upconverting function...

Re:Prior art

[johnw]

Just as an FYI and future reference, "disc" is reserved for optical media while "disk" is for magnetic (hard or soft media). Bollocks. The two spellings have been used interchangeably for years. Whilst it might be true to say that the trademark "Compact disc" requires the "C" spelling, extrapolating from this to your general rule is purely wishful thinking.

It is true that "disk" is more common in the USA, whilst "disc" is (or was) more common in English English, but all these things are becoming very blurred.

Re:Prior art

[glitch23]

I'm not sure how many I have to post before you are convinced but here goes:
Exhibit A (most reliable) from Apple

Exhibit B (least reliable but similar to what you said) is here

Exhibit C (medium reliability) from Washington State University

In the end, I believe they all support what I said.

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[ArikTheRed]

It is... oh god it is. I got a BR player, and it takes forever to boot. Not only that, some discs actually take forever to load beyond the boot-up time. Ratatouille actually took over 5 minutes to load when we tried to watch it... just sat there with a loading screen with a damn rat on it. I swear - it was laughing at me.

Re:Plus they are useful DVD players

[Vukovar]

True enough. I had purchased an upconvert after getting a plasma TV and the picture was still terrible; the HD-DVD player made an excellent upconvert for regular DVDs to that TV and I couldn't be happier. No, it doesn't boot as fast, but I'll put up with that in turn for an excellent picture on the TV at a fraction of the cost (2nd gen Toshiba HD-DVD players boot faster than the first gen).

Re:Prior art

[ChrisRed]

Well they are used interchangeably in the UK. I think it may be different in the US since the Cambridge Dictionary lists it as:

Definition

disc, US ALSO disk

noun [C]

1. a circular flat object:
   The dog's name was engraved on a little metal disc attached to its collar.
   See also CD; disk.

2. a small piece of cartilage (= a strong elastic body tissue) between the bones in your back
   
3. a musical record or a compact disc
   

(from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)

from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=22084&dict=CALD

I wonder what the correct spelling for the disk in SSD is?

Re:you missed the most important factor.

[MikeBabcock]

Of course you can. The amount of FUD surrounding Blu-Ray is phenomenal. The BD players I know of play DVDs, encrypted or otherwise, BD movies, encrypted or otherwise and even some other file types in some cases.

My Playstation 3 quite happily plays high definition content over my network using its DLNA (UPnP) functionality which for all it knows could be ripped HD-DVD discs.

Speaking of FUD and Sony, the PS3 quite happily rips CDs to its hard drive and then lets you copy them off to memory sticks, etc. if you want. They've also demonstrated a feature whereby a BD movie can be ripped to be played on your PSP on the go (although not without DRM of some kind obviously).

See also Sony vs. Microsoft round 1.