Slashdot Mirror
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."
Another difference from Betamax is that an HD-DVD player can play today's most popular format without trouble - the DVD. It can also act as an upscaling DVD player, so in fact you'll get better quality than a standard DVD player.
There was a Digg link where everyone laughed at play.com rebranding an HD-DVD player as an Upscaling DVD Player with HD Capabilities. I disagree with the laugh track - I think that's a clever step to take, and it's also completely true.
Cheers,
Ian
Of course, you can't play the resulting burned BD-R on a standalone BluRay player - as I understand it, they only play AACS-protected pressed BD discs.
While I think the HD players are an excellent cheap up-scaling DVD player, I question there value as a HD player. The catalog is tiny, and more importantly, there will be no new titles. So if I want the latest new release on a HD format, its blu-ray or nothin. I know, lots of people think up-scaled DVD's look just as good as HD, I just don't happen to be one of them. So, for me, I'll be picking up the high priced blu-ray media. I do think the war ended too soon. I was getting a lot of mileage out of the BOGO sales, which have vaporized as you could predict. Oh, and for those that will mention HD downloads, I'm already rolling on the floor with laughter.
Given the fact that HD-DVD titles are dirt cheap now, what about the prospect of buying up a lot of titles you want now and converting them to Blu-ray later? This is sort of like people converting VHS titles to DVD a few years ago, but without the problems of degraded quality.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
well yes, but you only have to store it on hd for 2 years. since then, burners for BD media will be cheap... i can't remember if hd-dvd does dual layer, so it's like 15-30 gb per movie. as for not playing it on standalone players, you can still play it back on a 'cheap' pc player with a bd-rom bd rom drives are still spendy too, they will be cheaper in 2 years though.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
This article is dead on and people are smart for doing this. Don't hate because someone knows a good thing when they see it. I just bought 10 HD DVD's for $50. And at a later point I will rip them onto my computer then burn them to a Blu-Ray disc.
It'd be great if the HD-DVD fans took a clue from Toshiba and stopped trying to push a dead format. They're not doing anyone any favors.
To be fair, I suspect Blu-Ray won't outlive plain old DVD. Unless Sony starts dumping $20 Blu-ray players with $9.99 movies, the rest of the world who can't afford Hi-Def TVs and Sound systems will probaly be satisfied with plain old DVDs for quite sometime.
Once the initial analog hurtle was jumped from VHS to DVD, there was no real need to go beyond that except those who had Hi-Def. Much like SCDs and mini-discs never took off, I personally believe Blu-Ray will be "good enough" until downloads, holographic discs, or solid state media takes off in 5 years. I still bet DVD will still outlast them for quite some time.
Just think of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD as the Laser Discs of the 21st century rather than VHS or Betamax. They're nice, but most people don't need them or will buy them except hardcore hi-def enthusiasts.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Another consideration is that by the time BD players come down in price in a year or two, they are likely to be multiformat players, integrating HD-DVD playback. The technology is already available (http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/09/05/lgs-bh200-hd-dvd-blu-ray-combo-player-set-for--october/), and since there will be a significant market comprised of people that don't want to repurchase their HD-DVD collection, it only makes sense that either this multi-format system will become standard, or be a very low cost option. So all these people taking advantage of cheap HD-DVD players/movies now can also take advantage of low priced Blu-Ray a couple years down the line with almost no down side.
Despite Samsung canceling its next gen combo player (http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006597.html), I think that this is a near term decision - when the market picks up for current model combo players, there will be financial incentive to meet that demand with new products.
Oh, was that my outside voice?
Such a ridiculous premium is put on technology costs by the "first on my block" factor, and so much value is ignored by the "fear of obsolescence" that great economies can be had by doing the opposite - jumping on technologies as they start to age.
Everybody who buys computers knows there's a "sweet spot" in price/performance that's about in the middle of the pack. If 1TB drives are just available, and you can still get 80GB drives but no smaller (not new), the the lowest $/GB is going to be around the 500GB size.
Well, the sweet spot for consumer entertainment boxes has tended to be near the trailing edge for over a decade now, not the middle. Unlike computer parts, there's very little Moore's Law involved.
I got a DVD player when they hit $300, and watched about 20 movies on it by the time they'd dropped below $100. So those 20 movies cost me $5 each to rent, and $10 each to own the player that early; I bought too soon.
Better results came from buying a LaserDisc AFTER the DVD had been announced and LD's dropped like a stone. I got it for a couple of hundred, watched several dozen movies on it before they were being sold from the stores, bought 20 discs for $5 each, and am still watching them one-by-one (and it's barely less good than DVD). In addition, it's now a conversation piece, a historical curio.
People still buy technology with the wrong, wrong mindset that it is a capital asset, that it will last a long time like a house, or at least a good car. It's not. It won't last that long anymore; not just the gadget, the ENTIRE FORMAT. My tapes lasted 20 years, DVD came and went in about 10, Blu-Ray is widely expected to be obsoleted by (often downloaded) AVI files in less than 10.
So treat it as an operating-money decision instead. Figure out the number of movies you watch in a year - if you're out of the dating years, have a family, generally Have A Life, it's probably less than 30, may be under 20. Then figure a five-year lifespan for a format these days, and that's the number of discs you'll play: maybe 100-150. Paying $600 for a player is $4-$6 per disc. Add then rental, and are you sure you don't just want to go to the theatre?
Frankly I don't give a damn whether I can see some actors face in all it's blemished detail, what I do care about is the likes of Planet Earth, Galapagos and so forth in HD.
Fact is, picking up a firesale HD-DVD player + Planet Earth, Galapagos and so on in HD-DVD as well as a few films that do actually suit HD well such as 300 and Transformers I've been able to get the content I actually want to see in HD early. I'd never buy an HD player for the likes of the Bourne series, simply because I already think Matt Damon is an idiot and I don't particularly care about watching a high definition idiot in my room, I'm quite content with people like him remaining standard definition, and in not watching that sort of thing in HD I don't feel like I've lost out on anything whatsoever.
I guess to put it another way, some films you watch for the fantastic visuals, others you watch for the story. The story based films really don't make much difference whether they'd HD or standard def. but you'd never watch something like Planet Earth for the story, whilst it's interesting the main pull to it is the fantastic visuals that make you realise how amazing our planet actually is so I had a choice. Do I wait god knows how long for a Bluray player to come down to £50 - maybe 2years or more? or do I just buy an HD-DVD player addon for my 360 for £50 and enjoy the content I actually care about seeing in HD right now. To me it's really a no brainer, as has been mentioned previously on Slashdot, it's not as if the 360's HD-DVD drive can't be used on a computer to rip the content to disc and burn to a Bluray disc sometime down the road anyway when the prices for burning Bluray discs becomes reasonable.
Some people look at me funny when I say I bought an HD-DVD player and a few films, but I struggle to find myself as being the joke when I've paid £90 for the same player + content they're paying over £300 for. I'm still possibly going to buy Bluray down the line, I just aint going to pay anything over £100 for it. It's all too easy for some people to overlook common sense and logical action due to over the top brand loyalty. I understand there may be some people who do want to see their favourite actors in all their high definition glory rather than enjoy the storyline but I'm not one of those and plenty of others aren't - for those of us who only watch story based discs for the story then even 700mb XviD (i.e. not quite as good as DVD quality even) is plenty good enough.
In its way, rather similar to what happened with the 3" floppy disc drive. For a while the two battled it out, then it became clear that 3.5" had won out, but then Alan Sugar made use of the fact that the price of 3" drives had dropped to practically nothing and put them in the Amstrad PCW256. Unfortunately, production of the media had pretty much stopped so for a while the drives were quite a lot cheaper than a box of 10 discs (which was more surprising then than it would be now).
The Amstrad box was so popular that production of 3" discs had to be restarted and 3" drives got a whole new lease of life. Still died in the end though.
The story is true and has a good point about early adoption and the value of the now defunct HDDVD. That said, it is not taking into consideration the fact that in 2 to 4 years phisical media delivery will likely be passee alltogether. BlueRay (Disclosure, I liked BlueRay more than HDDVD) will have a short lived victory now that Apple has broken into the download rental market. Once Apple takes the risks and gets a good working modle up (a la itunes store) then others will follow with more competitive pricing and featurs. Before I get flammed I know Apple was far from the first but they will push the envelope and stimulate adoption as they did with USB, i-pod, i-tunes distro model and now the i-phone. Love or hate that company you have to admit that once they adopt or invent a technology they seem to have a way of making it flourish.
"This message was sent from an Apple
The Criterion Brazil is great (wish they would re-release it in anamorphic or HD, though). But, for my money, the absolute gold standard of all DVD sets is still the Alien Quadrilogy boxset. It's like God himself came down and designed a DVD set. Nothing else even comes close.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
As i understand it, encrypted DVDs will only play with HDMI but unencrypted ones will play in hi-def. Since most pr0n is not encrypted, those Blue-Ray players would take a beating.
I am looking for an HD-DVD myself simply as an upscaling standard DVD player. They are cheaper than the regular upscaling DVD players on average.
This article is dead on and people are smart for doing this. Don't hate because someone knows a good thing when they see it. I just bought 10 HD DVD's for $50. And at a later point I will rip them onto my computer then burn them to a Blu-Ray disc.
And play them on what? They won't play on any BD player currently in existence, or likely in existence in the future (by design).
Then there's the media. How cheap are you expecting dual-layer Blu-Ray discs to be? Go look up the price of a dual-layer recordable DVD. And those have been out for five years or so. Right now, single layer Blu-Ray recordable discs are about $10 each. They'll come down eventually, but it will take a while, as it did with DVD.
In the end, you'll probably have spent about $15 total per burned Blu-Ray disc - which by that time will be more than you could have bought the real thing for used. (On a lot of Blu-Ray titles, it's *already* more than you'd pay for them, in some cases new.) I guarantee you 100%, without any doubt in my mind, that you're going to end up re-buying all these movies rather than burning them and watching them on a Blu-Ray player.
HD-DVD proponents really need to just let this whole thing go. What makes sense at this point is to either stick with DVD, which is fine, or buy a Blu-Ray player. It does not make sense to buy an HD-DVD player at any price. It is a dead format with a tiny library that's not going to get any bigger. Sure, the players can upscale DVD's, but so can pretty much every regular $40 DVD player these days. HD-DVD isn't even worth that $35 premium to play the few good HD-DVD titles that exist, especially when you factor in having to re-buy them for Blu-Ray (unless you see a need to keep two players hooked up, one of which will be for no other reason than to play the few HD-DVD's you actually own).
Save that $35 for buying your first couple Blu-Ray movies or paying for a couple months of Netflix.
I'd rather download a 700MB xvid or divx than a DVD iso. Time is significant. The quality is acceptable. Maybe its time to bring back XVCD?
This isn't anything to do with saving face on a lost cause, it's saving money on movies that you can buy right now. Don't forget, that HD player will still play regular DVDs, so for someone who doesn't have those "GOTTA GET SOME OF THAT" early adopter genes, a choice of 500 cheap titles for a $75 player is a better deal than 700 full price titles for a $320 player.
There are 2 kinds of Blu-ray discs, recordable and pressed. AACS is mandatory for pressed discs, but not for recordable discs. Recordable discs are half capacity of pressed discs, so (say) an independent filmmaker who doesn't want to shell out $20,000 for an AACS key is SOL. I'm not sure if the recordable discs are lesser quality than pressed discs in other ways too.
The (potential) problems:
1. NetFlix won't ship recordable DVD media, only pressed DVD media. They do so because pressed DVDs are much less brittle than recordable DVDs. I don't know whether recordable Blu-rays are more brittle than pressed Blu-rays, or if NetFlix will decide to carry recordable Blu-rays. I'd guess not based on their DVD decisions, so indy filmmakers, SOL.
2. I don't know if the recordable Blu-Rays use the same file system/feature set as pressed Blu-Rays. Can recordable Blu-Rays support picture-in-picture, for instance? I don't know the answer to this, but it's not hard to imagine Sony limiting its competitor's features.
When Blu-Ray won the format war, the big studios have essentially locked out smaller players from the hi-def home entertainment market. Oh well.
Yea, Burnable Media will be going out of business a year from now. DVD+R media is the only one BARELY still better than just buying a hard disk and leaving it on there. Once 1TB drives hit $100, then it is cheaper just to buy new hard drives than to 1) Buy a burner, 2) Buy the media, 3) Store the media, 4) Plus the actual time/effort involved in burning as opposed to just leaving an ISO or VIDEO_TS folder on the drive. At $100 per 1TB, the cost of storing a DVD is ~ $0.45, which is about the cost of media per disc if you are getting at least Ritek quality.
Harddrive manufacturers (and then in 3-5 years, flash manufacturers) are going to get a serious boost in volume within the year I would say, and media vendors are going to start consolidating and going out of business. Then in 3-5 years, when you can get a 20GB flash stick for $2, I can see it happening again. Whereas HD need to overtake media in price, I don't think flash will, as there are other advantages to using the sticks that they could cost say twice as much to store 20GB and still be useful.
http://blog.slaingod.com
While I can't speak for other bd players my PS3 has no problem playing discs without encryption.