“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.

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 article is unbelievably biased.  It looks like something from a Sony PR guy.  The same guy who declared BR has “won the war” a while back.  I find it interesting how they mention disney cartoons (like my 5 year old really cares about HD quality) and omit Transformers, 300, the Departed, etc.  They also fail to mention that any Blu Ray movie can be bought in HD DVD from Europe and played in the only region free player (HD DVD).  Today was a good day for consumers and a bad day for journalism.

Come on JK, 300 is on Blu ray and so is the Departed. And everyone and their mother knows 150mil bought Transformer exclusive to HDDVD for 18 months??? Whats the matter Toshiba can’t stand the heat blu ray was putting in your kitchen!

Like someone mentioned, we should all support the superior format(Blu Ray) so we can end this silly war. Superior specs and a more future proof technology.

HDDVD is just and updated DVD
Blu Ray a revolution for Media disk.

Dont kid yourselfs HDDVD supporters, you are loosing, dont prolong this more than it has to, is only going to hurt our(yes your and mine) goal to have HDM(High Definition Media) for future movies. Do you really want your movies stored on a server somewhere on the middle of nowhere, and have limited acces to them? Because that is what will happen the longer this war goes on.

Uh poor business model? I guess you clowns forgot that everyone still makes DVD players at all srots of price points, those $39 DVD players didn’t seem to deter Denon one bit.

Facts ARE facts, and truth will snap fans on their faces and the end of the year when all the writer’s statement of FACTS, can’t be covered with fingers as many tried at the first posts.

To be honest, the low prices only show desperation on Toshiba’s part. That’s why it’s bad news for HD-DVD supporters. But yes, blu-ray better do something because people WILL still buy them.

Selling a discontinued older model at firesale prices does not win the format war.  These $98 players have been sitting unsold in warehouses and shipping containers since the model was introduced in December 2006.  The consumer who is so cost sensitive to wait for this 1080i player deal, is not the consumer who is going to load up on $30 HD DVD’s.  Future HD DVD player sales and profitability are effectively gutted as well as consumers will now expect all HD DVD players to be priced just as cheap.

To the person who asked if i had any proof that Sony and it’s gaming division has lost almost a billion dollars........yes i do...they released these figures themselves and it’s actually almost 2 billion dollars.

These are figures released by Sony themselves to the stock markets.

Here’s a link.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/05/16/ps3losses/index.php

The above figure is for May 2007 and shows losses to that time....the figures are $876 million estimate but probably over a billion dollars.

http://play.tm/wire/click/1589606

The Nintendo Wii is outselling every console and Nintendo made a $500 million dollar profit in the same time that Sony lost $876 million dollars.

As far as consoles go....Playstation 2 is still outselling the Playstation 3 which has not got a lot of great games out for it yet and is still overpriced for gamers.

Sony will lose this format war because their trojan horse caught fire before it could get into people’s homes.

This article is still biased and it’s still poor journalism.

What a bogus biased article!

What nobody gets is that this isn’t a “war” where one side will win.  It’s a “war” where both are competing to survive.  With Toshiba paying studios to go HD-DVD only for 2 years, HD-DVD will survive.  Blu Ray will certainly survive.  That leads us to combo players- which are expensive now, but I bet will be $200 this time next year and will be the only type of high def DVD player around by the holiday 2009 season.

It’s simply a repeat of the DVD+/-R war, not VHS vs. beta.  Let’s hope they don’t screw it up by delaying decreases in price and turn it into DVD-Audio/SACD where downloads take over prior to the higher def media becoming commonplace.

And Sony was the first to release a dual DVD +/-R drive- let’s hope for a repeat!

The blog is written as my opinion, it was not written as a news item.
As for the facts, Blu-ray software is outselling HD DVD by almost two-to-one (From CE Pro.com: Blu-ray outsells HD DVD nearly 2 to 1 through September research shows).
Hardware sales are also outpacing HD DVD (From Video Business.com: Blu-ray set-top players out-selling HD DVD).

This is a format war because neither side refusing to back down. Their stake in their respective technologies is too much for them to give up the potential market of HD optical discs with NTSC DVD video sales and hardware having reached their pinnacle.

Titles will win this battle in the end and Blu ray has more studios, including Disney, which will drive mainstream consumers with its titles. This is not about early adopters, but the mainstream, and the mainstream is confused about these technologies. In fact, the mainstream is confused about HD period. (From CNN Money: Best Buy: Consumers baffled by HDTV).

History tells us two competing technology formats will not succeed in the market. Just look at VHS vs. Beta, DVD-A vs. SACD and the many recordable DVD formats that are out there. VHS won its battle and in the other battles neither emerged a winner.

Also remember when DVD was introduced in 97 it had almost the entire industry’s backing other than Circuit City and that probably was the biggest factor in the format succeeding. The DVD format later went on to be the most successful consumer electronics format in history according to industry statistics.

The WalMart sale was good for video enthusiast to get a nice product at a discount price, but you need look at why it was discounted.

They are no doubt blowing out old, overstock in anticipation for the new products that were announced in September, but this was a move to help HD DVD to stem the growing momentum that Blu-ray is gaining.

Bob Archer