http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/ Engadget HD Comments for http://www.engadgethd.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadgethd.com en-us Copyright 2008 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/11/15/ps3_allocation/

and the general malaise happening right now in the BD camp it's clear that HD DVD could be running away with this battle. Sure the delayed launch sucks but if they deliver in quantity to NA, EU and now Japan with sufficient quantity the whole landscape of the battle begins to change. I've sided with HD DVD right now. ]]>Nov 15th 2006 1:47PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/Nov 15th 2006 1:49PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/Nov 15th 2006 3:11PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/
88,000 BD players just landed in Japanese living rooms. 400,000 will hit the US in 2 days. The installed base of HD-DVD players is about to be dwarfed.

Everyone questions if PS3 owners will buy movies as if gamers are a subspecies of human. If you just spent $600+ on a device wouldn't you explore every feature of it? If games cost $60 then a few $20 movies isn't going to hurt once you get bored with the launch titles. I predict 2-3 movies sold at launch for every console.

3 Major CEs (not rebadges) have shipped first-gen players. By this time next year there will be a dozen 2nd-gen players on the market, along with the readily available $499 20GB PS3. HD-DVD has no support from other CE makers. No burners for PCs even announced.

ALL the major retailers support Blu-ray. Shoppers can't even find a working HD-DVD display unit in a store. How is it going to sell? Did I blink and miss the media coverage of the HD-DVD drive? Maybe they slipped it between the Wii and PS3 launch coverage.

Unfortunately, a console add-on is not going to save HD-DVD. Maybe a Universal player can when they arrive.


http://www.hdformatwar.com
http://www.shopforbluray.com
]]>Nov 15th 2006 3:14PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/
If the launch is any indication, it seems that the PS3 Blu-ray savior is a failure (at the moment anyways).

The resale price gouging wasn’t unexpected; and the press for it wasn’t too positive especially as it’s being touted as simply a “game machine” rather than the media centric machine Sony made it to be. If hardware availability mirrors that of the X360, it’ll be a while till it becomes the “affordable” Blu-ray player some of you out there have been claiming it to be. While at the same time, HD DVD will be gaining a lot of ground with the add-on unit for the X360 (reports say it works with pc’s as well) and standalone HDDVD prices will continue to drop.

Rick Lyon,

I’m not sure either, I think $499 is the MSRP and the $423 is street. When I first heard of the second gen unit, it was $499 for the US, but I’ve seen preorder sites with prices closer to the $400 mark.

With the available of the HDDVD add-on for the X360, the PS3 was never a real threat to the format war. The strategy might have worked if the two competitors had launched at the same time last fall and that the HDDVD add-on didn’t launch till now or never at all, but that didn’t happen.

Maemotaku,

88,000 is a bit optimistic if you’ve been following the coverage of the PS3 launch. A lot of those probably won’t even make it to the living room of the purchaser (but rather will be resold). The same is happening here in the states, you need only check on ebay to see. For anyone looking for a Blu-ray player, it would probably be a lot cheaper to buy the standalone units although we already know how well those are selling….

Spending $1500-2000 for a PS3 seems a bit outrageous to me and I doubt there are people who are buying it solely for Blu-ray play back. Unfortunately for Blu-ray, rich parents with more money than sense is the minority. $600 isn’t realistic at the moment, there are only a few that will actually have gotten it for that price with the intention to use it; while a large majority of them will be using it as primarily a game machine. Every PS3 sold is a “potential” Blu-ray device while every X360 HDDVD sold is a confirmed HDDVD device. Considering it’s primary function is gaming, that potential is probably less than 50%.

You’ve also completely disregarded the USB HDDVD drive for the X360, which has been shown to also work with computers, I guess you needed to in order to inflate PS3’s relevance to the format war. If it didn’t exist, I might have agreed with a lot of your PS3 points, but that isn’t the case. Since it does, any numerical advantage the PS3 would have had is being meet with a competing counterpart.

Those 3 manufacturers haven’t done much to make Blu-ray competitive. Number of manufacturers for Blu-ray is irrelevant if prices don’t drop to where they’re actually competitive with the competition. Right now, it’s not, that’s why HDDVD outsells Blu-ray… not only the hardware, but also the software.

We’re talking about a movie format here, not a pc storage format.

Obviously the “$1000” price is use as a symbol, much like $500 is used for HDDVD. Even with the price drop, the cheapest blu-ray player is still almost 2x of HDDVD with others almost 3x.]]>Nov 18th 2006 7:51AMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/
"Limited Quantites" for PS3 means a half-million.
By spring 2007 when supply is more available there will be a few million snapped up.

The magnitude of PS3 owners that will casually buy/rent Blu-ray movies between playing games will cast a long shadow over the entire HD-DVD microcosm.]]>Nov 15th 2006 3:34PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/
maemotaku- the PS3 will improve Blu-ray's movie sales/rentals but you're already at a 3:1 deficit. Blu-ray is going to want to improve that right away lest you lose some studios.

BTW the Xbox 360 HD DVD add on is doing very well. I think once again we have a dead heat between these two excellent formats. HD DVD is still cheaper $399 at some places]]>Nov 15th 2006 5:19PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/Nov 15th 2006 6:11PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/
HD-DVD (for High-Density DVD) is a digital optical media format for high-definition DVD. Its and old generation format. Its cheap and easy to produce. It has limited specifications.]]>Nov 16th 2006 6:30AMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/
The consumer will end up with the best solution (not necessarily the best technology) that suits their needs. The format that meets these needs first will win.

Nobody cares about Betamax in 2006. Enough with the lame analogy. Something pertaining to the demise of Laserdisc or D-VHS would be more relevant, but not be of any use to Sony-haters I guess.
]]>Nov 16th 2006 2:13PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/Nov 16th 2006 9:45PMhttp://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/11/15/toshibas-second-gen-hd-dvd-players-due-by-year-end-in-japan/
Regarding Betamax, it didn't die. It became the premiere analogue video acquisition format in the world for television programming. In the US it is still the number one ENG format. So if Blu-Ray fails in the consumer sector, it will continue in the professional arena. I've been using the pro version of Blu-Ray for 2 years now (http://www.sonybiz.net/xdcam), and the format has been extremely successful. Given the quantity the XD equipment has been manufactured in, it does puzzle me as to why there have been so many delays with the consumer Blu-Ray format.]]>Dec 21st 2006 9:59AM