HD Disc Format War Not Over By a Long Shot

[Lotus]

Originally Posted by glocksout

Are you honestly reporting on a rumor? One that has been vehemently denied by Warner on more than one occasion.

And Lotus keeps going on with the Fox rumor when Fox rejects that one as well.

The original author that posted the rumor removed any mention of it when he posted the full article on his personal blog. It's not true and reporting on it only harms the journalistic integrity of AVRev.

Fox was flirting with HD-DVD and going exclusive to HD-DVD. That is a fact. Sony convinced them to stay. So WB picked BD.

I discussed Fox and their flirting months back. It happened but the HD DVD PRG were unable to seal the deal. It wasn't a rumor.

I'm positive Jerry in BH has just as good if not better sources than I do. FOX was very seriously considering HD-DVD. When BD+ got cracked it made the conversations turn serious.

[glocksout]

It was just a rumor. Unless it is confirmed by Fox, it is always going to be a rumor. That's the way facts work.

[Lotus]

Originally Posted by glocksout

It was just a rumor. Unless it is confirmed by Fox, it is always going to be a rumor. That's the way facts work.

No that isn't how facts work. Facts have nothing to do with confirmation from Fox. Something is either a fact or not.

Why would Fox even confirm it in the first place? It would hurt the BDA. Fox has not denied it. How's that for confirmation?

[Vinyl Rules!]

Originally Posted by Lotus

HD-DVD has days to do something.

Will they?

It's really hard to say.

Who cares?

The MASS consumer marketplace does not care about high resolution DVDs, and most of you here don't seem to want to accept that the consumer marketplace has already decided the outcome of this so-called "war."

The issue, as has been alluded to in previous posts, is not the cost of the hardware, it is the cost of the software AND the fact there are two incompatible formats. What no one here seems to want to admit is that Joe and Susie Six-Pack are perfectly happy buying their cheap regular DVD's at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or getting them from NetFlix and viewing them on their up-scaling DVD player, if they have even figured out how to set it to upscale on their $1,199 LCD HDTV. And Joe and Susie will never buy a hi-rez DVD player: Their next purchase will be a video server to store their movie downloads on.

NetFlix is an accurate representation of DVD viewing habits: If only .3% of their total rentals are EITHER of the two hi-rez formats, then iMovies has won the war and Steve Job is the winner!

Period, end of discussion

Those of you who are so passionate about this issue (what Professional Marketers call "Early Adapters" and "Fringe" consumers - People like me who still purchase new vinyl LP's) don't collectively buy enough hi-rez DVD's in a year to pay Howard Stringer's salary, so continued discussion about this subject is simply an exercise in flogging a dead horse.

Let's find something else to discuss that's actually important.

[Lotus]

Originally Posted by Vinyl Rules!

The MASS consumer marketplace does not care about high resolution DVDs, and most of NetFlix is an accurate representation of DVD viewing habits: If only .3% of their total rentals are EITHER of the two hi-rez formats, then iMovies has won the war and Steve Job is the winner!

NPD believes that 220M DVD players are in use in the USA. Not counting the PS2s, Xboxes, PC drives, etc. used.

They believe 1.1M High Def players are used. With more than half of that having been bought in the last 60 days.

That comes to what? .5%? For the majority of the year what .25%?

All Netflix proves is just how pathetically small the HDM market is.

[TheMoose]

From The Digital Bits

Looks like the HD-DVD hardware wasn't doing all that good before the WB announcement & it has taken a big hit since!

Okay... so the latest hardware sales data from market research firm NPD Group is in, and it reveals that - as one would expect - HD-DVD player sales have also been impacted by the news of Warner's decision to drop the format later this year. One quick note: The data that follows does NOT include sales of Sony's PlayStation 3 or the HD-DVD add-on drive for Microsoft's Xbox 360. These are stand-alone, set-top players only.




As you can see, Blu-ray Disc players outsold HD-DVD players in the month of December here in the States by about a 60/40 margin, and that split has grown to 70/30 in favor of Blu-ray in the first half of January. This despite the fact that HD-DVD players were (on average) some $200 cheaper than Blu-ray players throughout the holiday shopping season.

But the most striking revelation in the data is the change in the hardware sales ratios between the first and second weeks of January (ending 1/5 and 1/12), reflecting the impact of Warner's announcement (and the mainstream media reaction). The graphs below show player sales for each format both before and after Warner's 1/4 press release...

As you can see, HD-DVD player sales dropped dramatically in the week after Warner's announcement, while Blu-ray Disc player sales nearly doubled over the same period.


How long can Toshiba hold out with numbers like this?