Warner denies wavering in format war
By Ben Drawbaugh 
posted Nov 5th 2007 1:40PM
posted Nov 5th 2007 1:40PM
Rumors were rampant last week as Warner's Blu-ray contract was set to expire and at the same time a exec from the neutral studio was quoted as saying they planned to change their HD movie strategy. The crew over at HiDefDigest went right to the source, and Warner was quick to let them know they had no plans to support either camp exclusively. While we believe this to be true, this is one of those cases when we doubt the studio would tip their hand in advanced. An announcement this big, would most certainly be followed by a PR barrage like no another, so while Blu-ray fans might be breathing a sign of relief, we're reminded of a time when the head coach of our favorite pro-team talks about how much he loves a player, the day before he's cut.
Cut Cut Cut Cut! We want blood! I don't care who, I just want blood!
WB could very well be playing the waiting game -- looking for a better contract that gives them a better share of the disc profits. Blu-Ray needs them a lot more than WB needs Blu-Ray. If Blu-Ray wants to sit on the pot and think about it, then WB may just go HD DVD exclusive.
Paying off goes both ways. Warner is probably letting both sides up the offers. HD-DVD needs Warner FAR more than bluray needs Warner.
I don't think the movies are made like that. I'm pretty sure the fee to use the format is paid on replication, after that, the studio can keep the money. Replication costs are about $2/a disc for both the HD formats, the rest of the cost goes to recouping the authoring expenses, film making expenses, marketing and maybe even profit if they sell enough of them. The deal Paramount supposedly got was basically promotional/marketing considerations.
I'm sure a decision will be post-Christmas... why would you decide before the biggest buying season? Unless of course BD or HD DVD gives them a nice payoff before then...
im new to this format war thing....but is this site leaning towards HD-DVD? it seems like HD-DVD is the winning format then?
This site may swing one way or the other, however Ben Drawbaugh is clearly biased toward HD DVD.
@Mathew N
Wow, you are new to this site!
This site is affectionately know as engadgetBD, and is most definitely VERY pro blu.
Having dealt with retail distribution systems, I'd be flabbergasted if they made a change before January. NOTHING in retail changes in November or December if at all possible.
matthew--
The site leans, if anything, toward Blu, although the policy is to be evenhanded. The users lean towards HD DVD, of late. Wasn't always that way.
If the cheap HD DVD player don't increase sales for HD DVD then Warner would likely go Blu... if there is a big switch over the next 2 months and HD DVD catches up, i'd be nervous for the Blu side.
Where is the cheaper BR player? Shooting themselves in the foot... and that profile 1.1 stuff... what a joke. Talk about killing yourself. And... the PS3 is not going to help player sales that much... they need a stand alone BR player that is 1.1 out there and is cheap.
It's not that blu couldn't sell a player cheap. It would hurt, but Sony could. The problem is that they can't sell enough to matter -- only PS3 has significant numbers coming out of manufacturing.
Toshiba planned this a while back and is apparently flooding the market with players. No way that any Blu player maker can come up with even 100K players in the next 2 months, while Toshiba tries to sell millions.
So, BD has to grin and bear it and hope Toshiba fails. This could happen two ways: either Toshiba can't sell even at $150, or they run out of stock well short of a meaningful number.
/actually if anything the users tend toward Blu Ray (hence the sales of discs, Blu Ray dominating by 2:1 factor in he US, 4:1 in Europe, 6:1 in Australia and 9:1 in Japan.
Seeing this, and kowing a lot of people (ncluding Warner) are watching Q4 to take a stance, Tohiba did a desperate "coup" by selling thousands of players at a total loss and extreme low prices.
Will it have any impat with Blu Ray having the excellent 40gb PS3 and a price reduction on Blu Ray players? We'll see in early January :)
The sale is not toshiba driven but retailer driven. Why can't people get a grasp on this concept? It's the holidays, time for the retailer wars.
/actually if anything the users tend toward Blu Ray (hence the sales of discs, Blu Ray dominating by 2:1 factor in he US, 4:1 in Europe, 6:1 in Australia and 9:1 in Japan.
Seeing this, and kowing a lot of people (ncluding Warner) are watching Q4 to take a stance, Tohiba did a desperate "coup" by selling thousands of players at a total loss and extreme low prices.
Will it have any impat with Blu Ray having the excellent 40gb PS3 and a price reduction on Blu Ray players? We'll see in early January :)
"so while Blu-ray fans might be breathing a sign of relief"
Excuse me? Wasn't the headline on this site the other day: "Warner Home Video to support Blu-ray exclusively?"
Well there were two conflicting rumours flying around, with bluray supporters trumpeting the stuff warner supposedly said at the bluray festival, and hd-dvd supporters getting hopeful because they had supposedly not renewed their bluray license.
Why would Blu-ray supporters breath a sigh of relief, wasn't the story that Warner were going Blu-ray exclusive?
There were rumors that they'd go HD DVD exclusive also, but we didn't pick up on it since we'd already covered the possibility that they'd go Blu-ray exclusive.
So, these retailers are suddenly selling these players below cost, without any kickbacks from Toshiba? Yeah, right! It's nothing but a desperation move on Toshiba's part.
I hear KFC is about to throw in the towel cause Pollo Tropical is coming out with this new top secret chicken that will make KFC's chicken taste like crap. Now that's news!
Best comment ever!
Who's to say that they are selling below costs? So far, there have not been any official numbers on how much it costs to make an HD DVD player. It's common during holiday season that retailers take a loss, IF ANY, on certain attractive items in order to gain traffic into their store in hopes the customer purchase additional items. That's the way of retail business, especially during the holidays. Otherwise, how do we see these $299 laptops and $99 LCDs?
attn: engadgetHD webmaster ///
where is the print command?
many readers want to save a web page with all the non-editorial content stripped out (so that the desktop search-space is not polluted with extraneous keywords) ...
and the print command is simple work-around for that purpose.
thanx/
ps: pls do NOT use javascript to implemement the print command! ... css3/xhtml2 (or even html5) will do the job fine ... many readers do NOT want to turn on jscript/actionscript because they are buggy and bog down the cpu!
House says: "Everyone Lies"
How come this is desperation on Toshiba's part, when Sony's $500/PS3 loss at launch was "clever marketing"?
Sony tried to pre-empt the format war by flooding the market with PS3s. Which they did. Unfortunately, the buyers were far more interested in games than in Blu-ray discs, especially when only 20-40% of PS3 owners even had an HDTV.
By all accounts (go back and look at what Paramount's Prez said when the went exclusive), Toshiba is going to have a go at ending the war this Christmas. THey at least know that an HD DVD sale is almost certainly going to someone who wants to buy movies. They maybe have to raise their price a bit because if people like me buy 3, they gain nothing, and if people use them as upscaling players they gain nothing.
But January sales of HD DVD will look much different with a million or two more HD DVD players out there. Then we'll see "desperation."
Kevin - excellent insight there. I agree that this is all about pull through. The main objective here is NOT to sell players but to create demand for HD-DVDs. That will create the base to support the format first and foremost but it will also build up a base for those of us who have already committed to purchase our second, third, and even tenth players. More players sold will help to lower the cost of production which in turn will smooth out the curve of market penetration so that it becomes a nice steady flow as the market accepts and converts formats from DVD to HD.
I have found that my collection so far does NOT mirror my VHS to DVD conversion and I believe this is going to be a fault that most pundits will make. I basically went through and repurchased nearly everything I owned on videotape again on DVD (much like I did when I upgraded from LPs to CDs years ago). One would think that this would also be true with the HD format however I have limited my HD purchases so far to nearly 100% new release titles and almost no back catalog replacements. The upconversion is outstanding and of course some titles are HD or BD exclusive and for me, that's a big "BFD". I'll just buy the DVD instead. Yes, it would be great to have the option of buying every new release in HD but right now it's too expensive to commit to that anyway so I'm just selecting the titles I MUST have and then everything else just defaults to what I would have bought on DVD anyway.
The big exceptions here are those cornerstone items like "The Matrix Collection". I know that eventually, if I wait long enough everything becomes available. Evidence of that is simple = there were items in my record collection that I thought would NEVER be released on CD and yet I've got them in that format. I just had to be patient. Until then, my Toshiba does a great job of upconverting and that's good enough for me.
Although Paramount went exclusively HD-DVD I think it's not likely Warner will, If anything they'll go Blu-ray which could potentially be another cementing point which even if it doesn't take out HD-DVD it'll keep Blu-ray from going anywhere.
What really gets to me is that a lot of the media seems to think that HD-DVD is the open group around here and Blu-ray is just this Sony driven format (Looking at you Leo Leport) but the reality is that Toshiba seems to be the only people really driving the HD-DVD format where as Blu-ray is this collaborative group that Sony just happens to be one of the larger players And are only known up their for the Playstation 3. They didn't even release the first player philips did (or at least I think it was philips.)
"Batman Begins" is a Warner's movie... so why has it only been released on HD-DVD and not Blu-Ray?