@Ryan, could you please recheck your numbers?

During the press conference, Toshiba said they had sold: "600,000 players in the US -- 300,000 of which were Xbox 360 HD DVD drives. 100,000 units were sold in Europe. And about 10,000 players and 20,000 recorders in Japan. So about 730,000 units worldwide."

Therefore, it appears that the standalone players sold in the US (excluding the X360 add-on) were 300,000 -- and not 600K like you reported in your story.

--> Ben: It should be important to add that standalone players was the one area where Toshiba "used to" trounce BD. The 2007 standalone sales figures were approximately 50-50 (you may check that with NPD).

The weekly ratio of 66-64 is well above the 2007 figures. Moreover, it shows that, despite one full week of slashed prices, Toshiba couldn't do better than being outsold 2-to-1. Is that a real improvement?

Tre revenue sharing is a model where the upfront rental cost associated with a product is replaced by a business where the videoclub and the Studio "share" the rental revenues.

Let's say that one rental copy of film AAA costs 100 $. With the traditional rental model, if a video store wanted to order 500 copies, they would need to pay 50,000 $ upfront, which is a lot of money.

With the revenue sharing model, the upfront cost of each copy goes -- say -- from 100$ to 5$. In exchange, the video store splits with the Studio the revenues from renting their 500 copies of the film.

The bottom line is that the revenue sharing allows the rental chains to order large quantities for each movie, without having to commit huge amounts of money.

Revenue sharing is typically associated to large companies like Blockbuster. Rentrak enables this program to the little guys and the indie outlets, even if they order much smaller quantities.

I only have one comment for the BDA and the HD DVD organizations:

Just give us the actual sales numbers of every disc, player and console sold YTD, and WE will decide who's winning the format war!

Number of standalone high def players sold in France by the end of April:
HD DVD: 2,600
Blu-ray: 800

Number of high def players (including the PS3 and the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on) sold in France by the end of April:
HD DVD: 10,000
Blu-ray: 108,800

Great. So we have now three different HD format. It doen't bring clarity, only confusion.

Warner, do ourselves a favor. Just pick Blu-ray for your movies, so this war is over in a minute.

I think that Disney's CEO Bob Iger has shown that this studio is willing to embrace new technologies and has become the forerunner in the digital arena. Also, Steve Jobs sits in their board, and as we know Apple is a founding member in the Blu-ray committee. Both companies are rumored to be working on a number of projects, and Disney's support for Blu-ray is both a logical and a winning choice.

Some Buena Vista execs have said that they plan to announce a major Blu-ray lineup at CES. We'll know very soon how strong their commitment really is.

SickNic wrote:
If you read the article, it sounds like Sony is saying this is an issue with older TVs, like it's the TV's fault that they don't do 720p, not the PS3's...

That's exactly the case. Why do you think those TVs were banned in Europe?

This is a non-issue in Europe where the HD Ready initiative states that only HD TVs supporting both 1080i *AND* 720p (or Full HD sets) can be sold to customers. Why didn't the US create a similar regulation to protect consumers and ban the sale of those lousy TV sets?