| What Sells In Consumer Electronics Today Is High-Definition – With One Exception |
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| Thursday, 03 May 2007 | |
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it takes is one trip on a Saturday to a Costco anywhere in America to
see the phenomenon. People are wheeling huge HDTVs to their SUVs in
numbers that make even the most optimistic Consumer Electronics (CE)
industry analysts’ heads spin. 60-inch plasmas for $2,999 have taught
mainstream America that the idea of owning a big, beautiful, flat HDTV
is not just for the people who we feature in ModernHomeTheater.com –
it’s for them, too. And they believe it and are investing in these sets
in record numbers.
Beyond what is on your cable and or coming down from the bird is a
growing list of sexy titles on both Blu-ray and HD DVD. The Matrix is
headed to store shelves soon. The James Bond thriller Casino Royale has
set sales records with over 100,000 units shipped, thus giving more and
more reasons for people to pop for an HD disc player to go along with
that flat HDTV. When prices drop even more this holiday season, look
for both formats to get a major boost, considering how many millions of
HDTV sets are installed currently in the market place. At this stage,
if you want to see what your 1080p set can really do, you need HD DVD
or Blu-ray or both. Cable and satellite are HD, but not “as HD” as the
two disc formats.Another source for HD is video games. Both the Gen X and Gen Y audience seem drawn to the amazingly complex, realistic and exciting world of gaming. Playstation 3, based on Blu-ray, was the story of Christmas 2006. Xbox has games that are also in very high resolutions. Recent reports show software sales for video games up over 33 percent year to date for the first quarter of 2007 vs. the same period in 2006. This is incredible growth in a segment that is relatively new to the consumer electronics market, but again, it is an HD format. “Always Fight the New Technology” Record Industry Motto (1890 to Present) It’s easy to see why the world of HD video is booming. Content is king and the content is getting so much better at such a fast pace that it is suckering in everyone from the average NASCAR fan to the guy with the Ferrari F430 Spyder in the garage to plunk down their credit cards for an investment. But in the music business, things couldn’t be worse. The know-it-all executives have taken a business that sold 33 billion dollars in compact discs in the early 1990s and parlayed that into about nine billion per year in domestic CD sales by 2006 – an unimpressive development, to be polite.  Historically,
the music business has fought all new technologies. The LP was going to
kill off the sheet music business, they cried. The DAT was going to
allow everyone to copy CDs, so they killed that format off to protect
the goose that laid the golden egg. And fear of people recording and or
downloading ultra-huge 5.1 audio files from SACD and DVD-Audio made it
necessary to connect both formats’ expensive players exclusively via
analog connections – connections that required in many cases not just a
$1,000 new player, but an even more expensive receiver or preamp and
$200 in audio cables, as well as a degree in Electrical Engineering to
figure out how to make a B-list Steely Dan record come out of your rear
speakers. Consumers voted enthusiastically “no” with their economic
ballots at the one pathetic attempt the record industry made at selling
their lamest titles at a higher resolution level, thanks to fear of
files being stolen. When were these industry leaders going to get
scared that people might not care about the entertainment they are
selling at any resolution? |
