HD DVD Prices Slashed By Toshiba

Hellburner writes "Hoping to stop the inevitable, Toshiba has slashed the price of entry-level HD DVD players to $150 — down from the previous $300. 'It's a half-empty, half-full moment for retailers, who could see a sales boost at the same time that some may be faced with price matching from holiday sales ... The theory: play up the acceptance by consumers who have already paid for HD DVD versus those who get it with something else like a gaming console, get more players out there--and dare studios to ignore those consumers. In addition to the sales cuts, Toshiba will launch major initiatives, including joint advertising campaigns with studios.'"

Great... just great.

Warner joins Blu-Ray. People think the battle is over. In response, HDDVD prices are slashed. Consumer's flock to HDDVD. Battle continues.

I'm really tired of this.

Re:Great... just great.

It doesn't matter what the player costs when there's little to no content for it.

Especially when Disney is Blu-Ray exclusive - never underestimate the number of parents buying Ratatouille for their kids.

Parents aren't early adopters

I know many parents who still use VCRs regularly (like me!).
Little kids aren't clamoring for better-than-DVD quality. They don't care or know the difference, and parents aren't going to fork over extra $$ for it.

Re:Parents aren't early adopters

parents aren't going to fork over extra $$ for it.

Hah! My kids are going to trounce those parent's kids. They'll be more popular (all of their friends will want to come see Ratatouille at their house, on the big, high-def screen); they'll be smarter, having all of the latest, non-obsolete technology; and they'll just be better, because they'll be technology winners (by association). Consequently, they'll have more success breeding, have more offspring, and eventually weed the Luddite parent's kids out of the gene pool. All thanks to Blu-Ray.

Just kidding. I don't have any kids.

--- SER

Re:Parents aren't early adopters

I think the parents you know aren't typical of the population. Most American parents will happily buy their kids DVDs, Blu-rays, etc., and the kids will scratch them up through mishandling, then the parents will go buy replacements and then complain about it, but never do anything to either 1) teach the kid to handle things more carefully or 2) get around the problem by using backups.

Most people are just complainers. They complain about stuff, but they refuse to find ways to solve their problems, and worse, they actively ignore any suggestions which would solve their problems.

Re:Great... just great.

Never underestimate how irrelevant it is for a grad schooler, that their Disney direct-to-video sequel is in HD or not.

Re:Great... just great.

Especially when Disney is Blu-Ray exclusive

Only in North America. In some other parts of the world Disney titles (at least some of them) are HD-DVD, due to different agreements with local distributers. And HD-DVD has no region encoding.

Re:Great... just great.

never underestimate the number of parents buying Ratatouille for their kids.

As a parent, that's one of the least convincing reasons to go with HD discs.

The minute I start buying kids movies on HD, I lose the ability to play those movies:
- on my laptop when on holiday
- in the car
- ripped onto my media centre
- on the upstairs SD TV

My kids don't watch a lot of TV...but the places they do watch tend to be non-standard. They don't go down to the theatre room & plan to spend a couple of hours watching a movie. That's a mom & dad thing.

Watching TV for them is more typically on the way to grandma's house, or for 20 minutes in the family room so mom can get dinner ready. Unless I invest in a whole pile of new technology, blu-ray reduces the options for my kids. Do portable Blu-Ray players even exist yet?

And to make matters worse...my kids won't even care. Oh sure, if I sit them down and force them to compare they might notice a difference, but they won't whine about having to watch the DVD version over the HD version.

For that matter, neither will I. I'm gonna pass on this format war until I have no choice whatsoever (i.e. blockbuster doesn't carry standard DVD's).

It's still possible that BOTH formats will go the way of the laser disc.

Re:Great... just great.

Actualy, the ps3 has quite a few games rated 80% or above, something like 40. Toss in the upper tier titles like folklore, uncharted, and rachet, and it's got some nice stuff. the whole 'ps3 haz no gamez!' thing is pretty outdated.

Re:Competition drives down prices!

It isn't about a price war, it's a format war. If I spend $150 on an HD-DVD player and that format dies next year, I have to buy a Blu-Ray player anyway. The money I spent on the HD-DVD player was a waste. This is where consumers have a problem. Generally competition is good, but eventually one format will win this battle and you don't want to be heavily invested in the losing side.

Re:Competition drives down prices!

Even if the item is on sale for dirt cheap, it still costs money to buy. I remember a story one of my professors told me. His wife comes back from shopping with a new $400 coat. When he asks why she spent so much money, she says, it was on sale, I saved $200. He said great. Go buy 4 more so we can pay the rent. The moral of the story is, buying something simply because it's on sale doesn't save you anything. It just costs you money.

Did your professor mention how comfortable the couch was?

Re:Competition drives down prices!

I've never heard consumers complain about price wars in the past... airlines, PCs, etc. Isn't that a big part of what capitalism is all about? While there are two competing solutions, since they have many similar features on a technical level, they're forced to compete on price. This tends to be GOOD for the consumer, at least in the short term. (In the longer term, it can be bad as lower margins can squeeze out smaller startup competitors in the field.)

That totally misses the point. We're talking *standards*, not *manufacturers*. Having multiple manufacturers who are competing for the exact same market is fantastic. But it doesn't help capitalism to have multiple standards; if anything, it fragments the market and makes competition more difficult.

Even then, IF players on the market could play either disc, then sure, competition between standards would be OK. But nobody likes hardware/disc incompatibility. Nobody likes buying a player that only gets half the movies released for it. Nobody likes having to have two damned disc players to make sure they can play what they want. And nobody likes buying a disc player whose maker loses the format war, meaning you spent hundreds of dollars for something that becomes a dinosaur in a year. Do you then go buy another disc player? Do you leave the player hooked up in your entertainment system forever even though it can only play the 5 movies you bought, or do you go re-buy those movies?

Basically, what's happening now is nobody wants to get caught up in the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray pissing contest, so a whole lot of people who otherwise would have bought a player by now are getting sick of the crap and want someone to win. That doesn't mean we want to see only one manufacturer making players; far from it. I'd like to see tons of manufacturers competing directly on the basis of a single standard. I'd like to get a better disc player than the one I have now, but I don't want to get in the middle of this crap.

Probably not enough to undo the damage

...but they do make good upconverting DVD players, and at that price can be bought as "An upconverting player that also happens to have a fairly good selection of real HD content for it."

I think more than that's needed for HD DVD to "not fail", but it still results in good value hardware hitting the market that's worth the money regardless of whether it supports a standard that may not end up going anywhere.

Why not both?

We've had to contend with +r and -r for dvd burning and I honestly can't tell you anything about them other than +r seems to work better with my equipment. My burner can handle both and I'm assuming if both of these formats can stay viable long enough, burners, players, and even the game consoles will eventually support both. MS is already on record stating the 360 would be able to support a BR player due to it's current high def player being external. A lot of people bitched that it wasn't included like the BR drive was with the PS3 but I think in the end they made a smart decision to go external. If the format does fail then they can easily switch and probably a lot of the people that have bought drives would buy again to get the new format.

I really don't care who wins out or if we end up with both. I'm sick of needing to replace my movie collection every however many years. I had a crap load of vhs. I now have a library of films on dvd. Am I going to replace everything with the media du jour? No. I have too much money invested in the shiny discs I already have and I don't see those going away for a very long time. Most people I know don't even have a high def tv yet and according to the story yesterday regarding the uber def format the Japanese are working on, why should I upgraded to BR or HDDVD only to have to upgraded again to support the crazy resolutions of yet another format in 2015?

I Own a Single HD-DVD

My mother bought me an HD-DVD for the holidays, assuming for some reason that I owned an HD player. Now, this is a series that I wanted in HD (Planet Earth), but I was going to wait till this annoying format war was over. Now of course, a month later, the format that she bought me turns out to be losing.

Anyone know if there will be some way to exchange formats, should HD-DVD finally die out? Buying a hybrid player seems like an awful waste for a single dvd. Anyone else have a contingency plan to play HD-DVD's that they own?

Too late...

Its too late. The writing is on the wall. With almost all studios having defected to Blu-Ray primary/Blu-Ray only, anyone who's been sitting out the format war to date is not going to jump at this.

Especially since, lets face it, you'd only care about Blu-Ray/HD-DVD in the first place if you drop $1k-2k+ on the TV itself, and another $200-1K on the stereo system.

Re:Too late...

Seriously too late. Toshiba could have done this before Christmas (and not just the one-day sales at Walmart) and took a short-term hit but likely gained a lot of mind share.

The best option

Make HD-DVD disks the same price as DVDs, or less. I don't care about getting a cheap player if the disks are going to cost me 25%-75% more for a movie that looks just as good (right now) on my TV as the cheaper DVD that I already own a bunch of players for.

Meh, it doesn't really matter at this point. Digital Distribution is going to end this format war a lot faster than Sony's or Toshiba's corporate posturing.

Victimizes the weak

I really hate moves like this.

This is simply taking advantage of mom 'n pop consumers who are just out to buy a nice birthday gift or something like that and don't read consumer electronics news sites.

There's probably nothing in particular that can be done to stop it. It's simply the strong taking from the weak, where in this case the weak are the uninformed. The current moral climate in the United States seems to accept that it is perfectly OK for the strong to take from the weak as long as there's no law against it, and as long as it only involves money. But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless.

I wonder how many of the Best Buys of the world will be warning customers that the price drop is a firesale of a product that many think will be orphaned, and how many will be stacking 'em up by the checkout isles and selling them as hard as they can?

Re:Victimizes the weak

Yes it may be orphaned, but these folks are getting one of the finest upconverting players available, that just happens to have thousands of HD DVD discs already available for it. If you think what Toshiba is doing it unethical, then how about what the BD group did by releasing 1.0 players that they knew might become obsolete so soon.

Something I discovered over a year ago

In 2006 I bought a Blu-Ray burner. Video editing/post production is my primary source of income and I already had the HD cameras and editing software and have been using it since 2003. In fact, I'm the only person in my area doing HD work for commercials, etc.. I get hired by other larger production companies who weren't able to, or not ready to take the HD plunge. I had a client who finally wanted work in Blu-Ray last year. So I bought the burner and offered small scale production runs to other videographers in the area who were now shooting and editing in HD, but had no way of getting it to their end users.

I remember looking at HD-DVD burners around the same time. It was about $600 for the Blu-Ray internal drive and it was about $1200 for an external firewire HD-DVD burner. Late spring/early summer 2007 I went to look at getting an HD-DVD burner as wedding season started. I figured the price of HD-DVD burners had dropped to the point where I could make a buck by offering the same service to others still not wanting to invest a $1000 in a burner, but still needed HD-DVD work. I could purchase the blank media at staples (both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD), which is saying something because it's a rural college town, not a big city.

So I went out shopping online and found HD-DVD drives for computers, but I couldn't find a single burner. I went to a couple specialist companies that sell high end editing equipment, and they didn't have any Pro-sumer grade HD-DVD burners (they had the high end stuff). Come to find out, the low-end/consumer/prosumer grade HD-DVD burners simply didn't exist. They weren't available.

That told me something right there. When people asked what format to buy this past christmas, I still said, "I think digital downloads is going to be the way HD-content is delivered to TV's. Whether that's Apple TV/iTunes, Amazon/Cable/Tivo/Sat. I don't know. My advice is to wait. But if you have to buy one, go Blu-Ray. I can burn Blu-Ray discs, I can't even find an HD-DVD burner.

Re:Dying format.

The real news will be when BluRay players are 150 bucks a pop.

Which is something that we won't see for at least a year--possibly longer. Something that struck me about the new BD player announcements at CES is that none of the manufacturers are lowering the prices of the entry level players (all are still around 400 bucks MSRP). Rather, they're refreshing/updating them and keeping the prices the same. The only price drops were on the higher end ones ($800 down to $650, for instance).

Re:Dying format.

Star Trek TOS: The Complete Series is on DVD/HDDVD hybrid.

Re:Cracking

Because it's still a hacker's game, instead of a general public game. 'True' hackers display their work in the 'scene' and not for public consumption. It's people on the fringes of the 'scene' that release all the stuff to the public.

If you think Bluray hasn't been cracked, take a look at the newsgroups and how many bluray rips there are. HDDVD, too, mind you.

So why are there no stories about BR being cracked? Because nobody's talking about it.

Re:MSRP?

The way most manufacturers enforce pricing is through advertising co-op funds. They can't tell a retailer what price to set, but they can tell them "We won't reimburse you for your advertising unless you set the price at $$$". When Best Buy runs their sale flyers, manufacturers are compensating Best Buy for their portion of the flyer. If Best Buy runs a price too high or too low then the manufacturer will refuse to pay co-op money.

Co-op is paid at anywhere from 50% up to 100%, and is based on how much a retailer purchases from the manufacturer. For example, in my hardware store we buy products from Scott's (fertilizer) and accrue 6% of our purchases into co-op funds. If I run and ad, feature Scott's products, and follow their price guidelines I get reimbursed up to whatever my accrued co-op fund is.