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Big-Box Movers Ignite Format War Battles
Wal-Mart has kicked off the holiday selling season early by offering a limited amount of Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD players for $98 and in turn sparked a pricing battle with its competitors.
Friday morning, in what may be an attempt by Toshiba and its vendor partners to stem the growing momentum that Blu-ray is building, Wal-Mart opened its doors at 8 a.m. to tech savvy consumers and bargain hunters seeking out heavily discounted electronics, including Toshiba's HD-A2 HD DVD player for $98.
Best Buy responded to its main competitor by matching Wal-Mart with a limited time online deal for the HD DVD player.
For installers and specialty retailers, this looming bloodbath could be the ticket that expedites an end to the format war. For installers who are taking a wait-and-see approach to the format war, this news means there may be a potentially profitable video category to show clients if a winner can emerge, while still maintaining some margins on their upper tier products.
Ultimately, of course, with both hardware and software sales tilting in favor of Blu-ray, it's hard to imagine Blu-ray losing, especially since Disney is starting to release family friendly titles such as "Cars" and "Ratatouille," which look fabulous in native 1080p, and other hit titles such as "Meet the Robinsons" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl."
Moreover, it also wouldn't be surprising to see some of the Blu-ray hardware manufacturers discount their products in time for the holiday shopping season.
TWICE magazine reports that Sony and other members of the Blu-ray Group won't do this, but the idea can't be discounted if HD DVD receives a significant bump in hardware and software sales and Blu-ray feels it needs to counterpunch.
This discounting, along with the group's current mail-in promotion that features five free Blu-ray discs such as "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Superman" and "The Patriot," could entice consumers more than the HD DVD camp's "Star Trek" phaser gun remote control and five free movies offer that features titles like "Pitch Black," "The Hulk," "Darkman" and "Troy."
In the meantime, however, apprehensive installers can step back and take stock in the fact that major box movers like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Kmart and others are doing the legwork in deciding a winner in this troublesome and detrimental electronics format war that's done nothing but inhibit the growth of the video market by confusing a populace that barely understands HD to begin with.
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Article Topics
News · Product News · Big-Box Retailers · Blu-ray · Blu-ray · Big-box Retailers ·About the Author
73 Comments (displayed in order by date/time)
The author of this article is attempting to advertise for Blu ray instead of reporting straight facts. It certainly isn’t hard to imagine Blu Ray losing the format battle. The Blu Ray only titles mentioned will eventually be released in HD-DVD in Europe, probably within a year, and eventually in the US. Blu Ray players are obsolete almost as quickly as they are sold, due to ongoing standradization problems in audio and video with the format. The HD-DVD players work, do more, and can often upscale standard DVDs as well as software update online. Currently, Blu ray has no answer, but this could change over time.
I agree, this articles writer has a slanted viewpoint. Poor form cepro….
The article started well but soon descended into bias…..please just tell the facts in future.
There is no evidence to suggest Blu-Ray will sell more in the months ahead….indeed this format war is still pretty much anyone’s to win…..Warner Bros hold’s the key to who will win.
As for hardware sales…The Playstation 3 is the only thing keeping Blu-Ray in this war…and Sony has lost almost a billion dollars selling it for well below it’s actual cost…how long can they substain these losses ?
It’s certainly going to be an interesting year ahead but if Warner Bros does go exclusive then whoever they choose will win this format war.
Pretty biased article. Also pretty irresponsible and biased of AVS for posting it.
Terrible, biased article that does everything it can to spin good news for the consumer into bad news for HD-DVD. I was in line for this at Wal-Mart this morning and I don’t think anybody else in line even knew about Blu-Ray.
WHO the #### wrote this?
I mean SERIOUSLY, WHO THE #### TYPED THIS ####!!
I was really contemplating jumping into the HD format market via Blu-ray, but after reading this utter #####, I’ve decided to take the RED PILL!
#### 2-Gay, with $99 HD DVD players NOW available to the general public, Sony better watch they don’t lose this war, COS they seem pretty ###### in the gaming scene at the moment, don’t they?
Who’d have thought that after all the years of video game domination, Sony are now relying on a ###### up HD movie format war to Survive? With a reported $12 BILLION dollar long-term debt, SONY IZ FUCKD!!!!
take the RED pill
What a biased writer. He is taking a postive HD DVD event to spin it as a BD advertisement. Negative campaigning truly sucks. I will not support Blu Ray until they change their behavior.
Wah! Boo hoo! I’m an HD DVD fanboy.
The writing is on the wall, CE companies won’t waste their time making $98 HD DVD players when they could stick with BR and DVD and continue making profits.
LOL. you need to all relax and realize that articles like this one have nothing to do with how will win the war. Actually all of the AVS posters combined don’t have much say. It’s just the truth about the number. We are a few thousand posters. It will take millions to win teh war.
Just relax… and enjoy the movies.
Wow, did all the toshiba and MS employees come over to bash the article, it is nothing but facts i dont see what you all are cramping over.
Thank you for a nice article. This seems like a really poor business model by Toshiba. I wish that they would just start working productively with blu-ray for the betterment of the movie/media industry as a whole.
I can’t believe this garbage of an article was allowed to be printed. This Robert Archer guy needs to get his facts straight. It’s these kinds of lies that really hurt HDM and adopters. I can’t believe AVS linked us to this trash. For any future readers who are not in the know of HDM, ignore everything you have read in this article. It is incredibly biased towards blu-ray. Robert Archer needs to be banned from what ever organization he is from.
“As for hardware sales…The Playstation 3 is the only thing keeping Blu-Ray in this war…and Sony has lost almost a billion dollars selling it for well below it’s actual cost…how long can they substain these losses ? “
A billion? Have any proof of that; I mean seriously, what are you thinking? You also must have missed the article that said there are only 400-500 total standalone players total (blu/hd), with HD having a slightly higher share. So I would hardly say the PS3 is the only thing keeping it in the war, considering both markets have terrible standalone sales, but one market has a much larger base. So by your own logic, HD should be dead already.
^ that is supposed to say 400-500k
“this troublesome and detrimental electronics format war that’s done nothing but inhibit the growth of the video market”
Are you kidding?
Do you think we’d be seeing prices like this without the so-called “war”? The big sale has probably brought in more HD-player owners in a few days than standard DVD did during it’s first year! And without the format war, everyone would have to pay $500 - $1200 for region-encoded players. How’s that for inhibiting growth! Simply put, the ONLY reason BR sales seems stronger is due to the PS3 gaming console.
I missed out on today’s sale, but there’s always Black Friday (Wal-Mart has allegedly ordered one or two million players). And while I’m sure CARS will sell well, so will SHREK. And personally, I’m happy to forgo PIRATES in favor of Cronenberg’s EASTERMN PROMISES. But that’s just me.
Even Virgin Megastore (NYC) is getting into the act, giving away free HD-DVD players to the first buyers of the DTAR TREK HD box set.
And all of this doesn’t even take in to account the discount Venturer players, which I’m betting will sell for less than $90.00. (Not trying to say that cheaper Chinese players are great, but it will serve to get even more players in to more homes. Even if Sony discounts their players to $399.00, that’s still to expensive to justify.