If I'm not mistaken, about a week ago NPD said that 7 out of 10 people who have HDTVs said they were content with DVD.
People still have to be convinced to get a high definition player. I'm thinking the players need to come down to a more mainstream price (sub $200), and it wouldn't hurt if the titles themselves were cheaper.
There's a difference between lowering cost to survive and lowering your cost to be affordable to the masses. At $399 or more I think Blu-Ray is on the fringe.
The original PS2 was $299 when many DVD players at the time were $500+. Within 2 years, it was $199, and many stand alone players followed suit to the same level of pricing.
What I'm saying is, is that if prices were lower, I think you'll have mainstream sales. Right now Blu-Rays biggest competitor is DVD.
Toshiba's problem wasn't dropping the price to $150, it was doing it after the crap hit the fan. If they had done that last October, we would be having an entirely different discussion today. There are lots of things that contributed to the blu-ray win (Sony owning or controlling 30% of the movie biz didn't hurt), but the bottom line was that Toshiba tried to win on the cheap.
If they were willing to spend $500 million dollars to get Fox and Warner to switch, they could have sold 2 million players at a $250 loss and utterly won the war last Xmas. But no. And in the end they can only blame themselves.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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If I'm not mistaken, about a week ago NPD said that 7 out of 10 people who have HDTVs said they were content with DVD.
People still have to be convinced to get a high definition player. I'm thinking the players need to come down to a more mainstream price (sub $200), and it wouldn't hurt if the titles themselves were cheaper.
Sub $200? Tell that to Toshiba and they'll tell you how well that worked out for them...
You might remember that was the same thing that people were saying about VHS when DVD was released.
There's a difference between lowering cost to survive and lowering your cost to be affordable to the masses. At $399 or more I think Blu-Ray is on the fringe.
The original PS2 was $299 when many DVD players at the time were $500+. Within 2 years, it was $199, and many stand alone players followed suit to the same level of pricing.
What I'm saying is, is that if prices were lower, I think you'll have mainstream sales. Right now Blu-Rays biggest competitor is DVD.
@Deeznutz
Yeah, so let's leave them at $400+, that'll work!!
Toshiba's problem wasn't dropping the price to $150, it was doing it after the crap hit the fan. If they had done that last October, we would be having an entirely different discussion today. There are lots of things that contributed to the blu-ray win (Sony owning or controlling 30% of the movie biz didn't hurt), but the bottom line was that Toshiba tried to win on the cheap.
If they were willing to spend $500 million dollars to get Fox and Warner to switch, they could have sold 2 million players at a $250 loss and utterly won the war last Xmas. But no. And in the end they can only blame themselves.