Toshiba extends 5 free HD DVD offer until September 30
By Richard Lawler 
posted Jul 18th 2007 2:48PM
posted Jul 18th 2007 2:48PM
We are shocked, SHOCKED to find out that not only does giving away movies and lowering prices increase HD DVD hardware and software sales, but now Toshiba has announced it is extending its "The Perfect Offer" of five free HD DVDs from a selection of 15, via mail-in with the purchase of any Toshiba HD DVD player. Originally set to run through July, the promotion has been extended until September 30th, so you might be able to find out if that Harry Potter box set has any HDi special features before choosing a side in the format war. Still, with the base HD-A2 player at a price of $299 and several free movies in the mix, Toshiba's certainly hoping to grab the attention of remaining fence sitters and current Blu-ray owners alike.Read - Consumers Can Get 'The Perfect Offer' All Summer Long With Toshiba's 5 Free HD DVD Disc Promotion
Read - The Perfect Offer web site
The HD-A2 is only $249 at Amazon.
FYI, September has and will always have 30 days. Please edit your headline accordingly, sir. Funny article, BTW. HD DVD owners unite!
I'd rather pay $270 at Costco and have their return policy and the HDMI cable that's included.
I predict at the end of Sept. Toshiba will lower the price again with a different movie giveaway...something like $199 and 3 free movies...just in time for Christmas sales.
I'm waiting to see someone say this move smells of desperation.
Wow, this move smells of desperation... lol
It kind of does though. In any case, it is an excellent offer.
Well Toshiba is the one who came up with the promotion originally. Now the BD camp has copied it. If anything, it is the BD boys who are desperate here, not HD DVD.
Correct. Blu-Ray zealots (and it's interesting cause I own a PS3 as well and some of these guys don't even own any hi-def hardware) don't seem to get. HD DVD is just going up. People are obviously buying movies and hadware to watch movies. PERIOD. No PS3 illusions, or whether I bought it for gaming but I can watch Blu-Ray movies. This is not how one format wins. Maybe it's not really a good thing. WIth HD DVD EVERYONE who buys it, WILL with 100% certainty buy more then several movies as they bought them EXCLUSIVELY for watching movies. It's very simple. This changes numbers quite significantly. Let's say that we have 200k STANDALONE players for HDDVD. This means that if every owner has at least 5 or more movies, means that they bought 1 million titles and more. This is not including the HDDVD addon for X360, but it's actually the same thing. X360 addon is solely bought for watching HDDVD movies. So let's add 100k+ HDDVD addons to this equation. This means at least 300k owners have at least 5 movies and even more with these promotions. That means 1.5 million titles sold. THis number CAN ONLY go up. With PS3, this is not the case. The market ALREADY reached saturation due to the high price of the console and this is EXACTLY where the price issue comes into play and now until PS3 gets a significantly lower price it won't sell well. Not only that, but EVEN with new games coming out (that I"m anxious about as well) there will be no real reason for gamers to buy as much movies as they are possibly buying now (again that's a much smaller percentage as if they sold 1 million titles on Blu-Ray and there's 3.5 million PS3s sold worldwide). Just watch, as soon as new games for PS3 start coming out, you'll see a significant drop in sold Blu-Ray titles. This is very logical, because right now as there's lack of REAL games, people have nothing else to do but to BUY Blu-Ray movies.
Let's not forget the Blockbuster joining the BD camp, now more then EVER PS3 owners have NO interest in BUYING movies. So this is only a good thing for HD DVD.
I'm just really amazed at the percentage of people who HAVE ABSOULTELY no deductive reasoning. I think it's becuase most people don't have enough info to even form a big picture.
I'm not sure how people can say desparation in any way. HD DVD has been on the market for some time longer, ALWAYS had at least 2x lower price of hardware. THere's NOTHING that reeks of desperation for HD DVD here. THey have the technology LONGER, they have more advanced HARDWARE (every review supports it) and all they are doing is driving sales with promotions. The only one who is desperate here is Blu-Ray camp. They just don't have a solution. Blu-Ray is JUST simply not growing fast enough. They see that PS3 just not GIVING them the win. Hardware companies like Pioneer, Samsung and others are actualy LOSING money as their sales numbers are pretty LOW. This is why most of them are looking into hybrids anyways. So the only thing THEY can do is LOWER at complete loss the prices and give movies away. Let's say giving movies away is not really an issue here, but you can see how much they are UNABLE to lower the price when the LOWEST priced Blu-Ray is still $500. Hellooo. With HD DVD at $249 and a bunch of free movies, overall higher number of releases in the upcoming and recent period and new support initiatives by laptop manufacturers, Microsoft and AMazon (with 1000 HD DVD indie movies) and national retail chains now STACKING everywhere HD DVD in the first rows, along with no regional coding (that allows me to buy even certain BD only movies in the States that are available in Europe on HD DVD) and play them here in States, and the upcoming sea of low cost chinese hd dvd players to hit the market before year's end, I don't really see ANY REASON for HD DVD Group to be desparate. Again, it's Sony who is becoming very worried as they can't really catch on the price train and the interest and the hype for Blu-Ray after PS3 launch is slowly but surely falling off.
As a casual observation, currently Amazon shows 337 bestselling HD titles vs. 15 bestselling Blu-ray DVD titles. On a personal basis, my jaw dropped when I saw my first HD DVD demo!
http://www.worlddvdsales.com/index.php?c=HDDVD&x=HD_DVD