$100 HD DVD player

[Heath McKnight]

FYI, Circuit City only dropped it to $129. I couldn't find it on Wal-Mart's site.

heath

[Craig Seeman]

I heard there was initial batch for $99 and sold out in five hours. I think that was the one day sale people mentioned above.

$129 seems to be the price it's floated back up to after the sale.

[Thomas Smet]

Wal Mart was also going to have the normal price for the older model HD-DVD players at $200.00.

What is so wrong with wanting to sell off all the older players and get things moving.

For months we have all complained that the price of HD needs to come down and then when somebody did it the other camp says it is bad tactics and a sign of desperation. Would you be saying the same thing if Blu-Ray did it? No you would be sitting here saying "I told you so" and "look how awesome SONY is."

Did it ever occur to anybody that maybe this was the plan all alone. Perhaps it is all over priced and Toshiba finally made enough money back that they can really start to sell cheap. Besides low prices are what is going to jump start HD with the consumers. If HD-DVD wasn't around Blu-Ray players may still cost over $1,000.00.

Yeah and SONY has never paid people off before right? You guys say it like it was some kind of a dirty drug deal. But yet if SONY did it it would be great strategy. The fact is Toshiba convinced some of the sudios that a cheaper format would get consumers on board faster and they offered a bonus to gain their trust. Do any of you think a Studio would risk loosing millions of dollars on sales if they didn't really think there was hope in the format? Some of the last topics are starting to border on speculation because none of us know exactly what is going down in these deals.

Why do you people love Blu-Ray so much? Other then storage space it offers nothing at all. If you really want more video then make it a double disc set. I prefer it that way anyway. It's not like I can watch a movie and the special featrues at the same time. The argument that more companies support it is bogus too. That is something that can change as soon as one format takes off. Do you think Samsung and Panasonic are going to just sit by if HD-DVD takes off? Heck no they are going to jump on board as soon as they see where the consumer dollars are. I cannot figure out why people are so loyal to a format when a lot of those people don't even own any of the equipment yet. I'm really starting to get sick of this fanboy attitube. We see it towards cars, cameras, tape brands, disc formats and ATSC HDTV standards.

I am not a fan of Toshiba. I don't really care who wins but my money is with HD-DVD because of the lower cost. That is all I care about. I have enjoy the same level of quality and give my clients the same level of quality for a much lower cost. As video producers shouldn't that be the most important thing to all of us? How we can sell HD to our clients so we can make more money. Cost is the only reason why I support HD-DVD. End of story. It works very well is high quality and is cheaper.

HD-DVD works and it works very well. I have heard very very few issues with HD-DVD players other then they boot up slow. Every single person I know who owns one loves it. I have yet to read anything bad about a HD-DVD player other then by people who don't even own one or even a Blu-Ray player for that fact.

This thread was started to inform people about low cost HD-DVD players and how the format seems to be gaining a lot of steam and all the Blu-Ray people can say is that Toshiba is doomed and this must mean HD-DVD is garbage.

[Heath McKnight]

I think HD DVD is being aggressive, and I like Blu-Ray, but I'm frustrated they aren't coming back with something cool, like a $100 or even a $200 model.

heath

[Craig Seeman]

I'm frustrated because I can get a Blu-ray burner for a little over $600 but can't get an HD-DVD burner.

As a video professional I need to be able to deliver to my client.

[Lawrence Bansbach]

Originally Posted by Craig Seeman

$129 seems to be the price it's floated back up to after the sale.

If it stabilizes at that for a couple of weeks, then you know that it'll drop below $100 at least on Black Friday. Some company in the Blu-ray camp should do likewise just for the hell of it -- sell a model for, say, $89.99 for the duration of the Christmas shopping season. Or better still, every Blu-ray manufacturer should do it just to show they are serious and aggressive. You can't convince me that Blu-ray players cost so much more to produce that it couldn't be done. Problem is, mostly only people with HD TVs will buy them, although they make decent SD DVD players until you upgrade your TV.

[Craig Seeman]

Originally there were stories that HD-DVD players would be $199 and then drop to $169 on Black Friday. Seeing $129 already was a bit of surprise to me. Maybe Blu-ray manufacturers didn't think $199/$199 that would be as much of a threat. Matybe Toshiba realized the previous price wasn't enough of a market push. It sure seems HD-DVD or at least Toshiba decided to push hard though. I can't help but believe they're doing this as a "lose lead" strategy that Blu-ray may not want to emulate.

I would think that those $449 Blu-ray players could drop to $299 though.


I don't doubt there's an overall market strategy in Toshiba's "lose lead" strategy. Such a low price may push the sale of HDTVs (Toshiba's?). Homes that don't have satellite or cable HD might now be attracted by having disc playback. The "studios" that have invested in releasing HD-DVDs will now have a market to sell to. I suspect the sales on TVs and discs may be the reason for the "lose lead" strategy.

The Blu-ray infrastructure (not simply making players but the disc manufacture and replication) is more expensive than HD-DVD and that's been part of the "discussion" on this format war and one some studio chose HD-DVD. Hence Blu-ray may not be in the position to "lose lead."

Originally Posted by Lawrence Bansbach

If it stabilizes at that for a couple of weeks, then you know that it'll drop below $100 at least on Black Friday. Some company in the Blu-ray camp should do likewise just for the hell of it -- sell a model for, say, $89.99 for the duration of the Christmas shopping season. Or better still, every Blu-ray manufacturer should do it just to show they are serious and aggressive. You can't convince me that Blu-ray players cost so much more to produce that it couldn't be done. Problem is, mostly only people with HD TVs will buy them, although they make decent SD DVD players until you upgrade your TV.

[Heath McKnight]

If both drop prices dramatically for Black Friday, I'm buying!

Heath

[Craig Seeman]

And I'm seeing base prices for 42" 1080P HDTVs down to $1099 already (Vizio and Westinghouse to name a couple). 720p models are less and when you get down to 32" the prices are not much more than getting a good 27" CRT TV a few years back.

[Heath McKnight]

Westinghouse Digital is my pick for affordable 1080p HDTVs. My friend bought a 42" model and I love watching Blu-Ray DVDs on his PS3.

Heath

[Kevin Shaw]

]Jordi Ribas, General Manager of HD-DVD, Microsoft. "I can't speak to specific numbers, but based on recent NPD data, there have been more Xbox 360 HD-DVD players sold than all Blu-ray standalone players combined. The Playstation 3 simply hasn't been the gamer changer Sony had hoped it would be."

That's all wrong because the Sony PS3 clearly gave Blu-ray a big edge over HD-DVD in 2007. Within a few weeks of the PS3 launch the sales of Blu-ray movies went from slightly behind HD-DVD to basically double, and stayed there for most of this year. (In the past few weeks it's been about 60-40 in favor of Blu-ray.)

At some point the relative cost of standalone players may matter more, but if you can buy a complete game machine and multimedia center for $399 versus something which just plays movies for about half that, the PS3 is actually a better buy. The latest aggressive pricing of HD-DVD players will undoubtedly help that format going into the holiday shopping season, but it's about the only thing keeping HD-DVD alive when most movie studios and consumers are happy with Blu-ray and independent producers don't have a choice because there are no HD-DVD burners.

Sooner or later most movie studios will probably decide to back just one HD format to make their life easier, and once that happens it won't matter how many cheap players are in circulation for the other format.

[Lawrence Bansbach]

Originally Posted by Craig Seeman

The Blu-ray infrastructure (not simply making players but the disc manufacture and replication) is more expensive than HD-DVD and that's been part of the "discussion" on this format war and one some studio chose HD-DVD. Hence Blu-ray may not be in the position to "lose lead."

I don't understand this. Why should the price of the manufacture and replication of the media have anything to do with that of the player? If you're saying that player prices are in part underwriting the cost premium of disk production, that doesn't make much sense -- surely Chinese manufacturers wouldn't care about that. Besides, the loss-leader approach is something that Sony and other manufacturers have tried for years to grab market share. The Blu-ray camp simply can't go on pricing their products that much higher than the HD-DVD camp's and expect to win, regardless of the alleged technical superiority of Blu-ray.

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Craig Seeman

The Blu-ray infrastructure (not simply making players but the disc manufacture and replication) is more expensive than HD-DVD and that's been part of the "discussion" on this format war and one some studio chose HD-DVD.

That's a myth which has been dispelled by analyses showing that the bulk cost of making Blu-ray movie discs is only a few cents more than for HD-DVD...and for that extra few cents you get almost twice the content capacity per layer. Movie studios like Blu-ray both because of the higher capacity and (by some accounts) better copy protection. The main reason any movie studios are exclusively making HD-DVDs right now is because they're being paid to do so, and those incentive contracts expire around the end of next year.

[Ethan Cooper]

Ok guys, everyone go back to your respective corners for a moment. The whole point at the beginning of this thread was not the technical superiority of one format over the other, or each format's strengths and weaknesses but rather the simple principle that when dealing with selling a product to the general public (which is the goal of both Blu-Ray and HD DVD) that a sudden shift in price should have a somewhat equal shift in sales.
Ultimately, Joe Public doesn't know or care about all the technical stuff that we on this board do, he cares about price. When he looks at one player costing $200 and another player costing $400 and sees that they both offer comparable quality on the cheap, poorly calibrated plasma or LCD he's looking at in his local electronics store, he's probably going to take home the less expensive of the two. The format that wins the "war" will not be the one that can capture the hearts and minds of we videocentric pixel snobs, but it will be the one that puts the smaller dent in the average consumer's pocketbook.

[Craig Seeman]

I do think Lawrence and Kevin are speaking from biases and NOT about the reality of the business and the calculations that are going on. It's sounds like they're speaking from what THEY WANT things to be like, not on the REALITY or STRATEGY the "studios" have.

You BET the manufacture and price of players is, in part, tied to the costs of disc production. It has to do with contracts and incentives and calculated risk and retooling production facilities etc.

Blu-ray cost more for MANY REASONS.

Like people at a poker table, they're calculating odds and taking risks but those risks have EVERYTHING to do with the cards they're holding.

Price of a player is a KEY and probably a leading point but even that is NOT the only point. There's price and availability of the media (the movies) that is also critical. In fact, in the long run, THAT is probably the biggest issue since there's the studio investment in manufacturing and sales of MOVIES where the money is to be made (from the studio/manufacturer's perspective). The consumer is very much thinking about that too. How much is that HD movie going to cost to own, can you get your favorite movie on the given format, can you rent the movies you want. You're NOT going to spend $129 HD-DVD player when every movie you want will only play on the $449 Blu-ray player.