DISQUS

allendale · 1 year ago

sony will lose.

Paul Ellis · 1 year ago

I know who I'd like to see "win", but I'm not sure who will lose. I do know that most people ignore the fact that the general public overwhelming are not buying Blu-ray standalone players. That has to be an issue for the "regular people" segment. After all, the marketing trick isn't to get gamers to watch HD movies, it is to get my parents to watch them.

Fruition · 1 year ago

At this point, it's a simple matter of which format is selling the most, not which standalone players are selling the most. Because in the end, the ones who determine which format wins are the movie studios, not the consumer.

Paul Ellis · 1 year ago

While you have a good point, I just don't think the consumer entirely doesn't matter in this. Just think what would happen if everyone keeps buying DVDs instead of Blu-ray because the discs are too expensive (currently BR disc production is heavily subsidized to be competitive), and there is a large install base of HD-DVD players being used as upscaling DVD players primarily. Now consider that the DVDs people are buying only average $12/disc, but they could sell the same movie in HD-DVD (whose production costs are very close to DVD already) for $20, and people would actually buy them. These are products that are hugely price sensitive. There aren't any inexpensive Blu-ray players that are comparable in features (BD Live aka 2.0 profile) to HD-DVD players.

If Blu-ray can't get cheap enough (players and discs), people will not buy them in volume. Too be honest, disc sales right now are so abysmally low compared to DVD (tens of thousands vs 10s of millions) that any lead that one format has over the other in disc sales is insignificant. It will take a large number of players to facilitate the large number of disc sales, and very few standalone Blu-ray players have been sold. Nevermind the fact that somehow, less than half of PS3 owners know it does Blu-ray.

I think it is still anyones game. That's my $.02.