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PS3 price cut won't affect format war
Author: Phil CogarPublished: 8th October 2007
The European HD DVD Promotional Group says that the recent PS3 price cut won't help bolster the Blu-ray format.
“The European PS3 price cut will have a minimal impact on the adoption of next generation HD formats. The real battleground is in sales of standalone players and HD DVD is out in front by a massive margin,” said Ken Graffeo, Co-Chairman of the European HD DVD Promotional Group. Of course, one has to take this with a grain of salt - this is the HD DVD Promo Group, after all.
According to the promotional group, HD DVD players hold 70 percent of the European market and they predict the numbers to grow. An HD DVD player manufactured by Venturer that will retail for less then €300 and the Toshiba HD-EP30 selling for less then €400 are a couple of the bigger pushing points for the format. Of course, having the HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360 does not hurt things either.
Traditionally, games consoles aren't used as DVD players in home and a recent study seems to confirm this. A research study by The Diffusion Group shows that less then forty percent of all games console purchasers actually use them to watch DVDs.
A large library of movies is also helping to push the HD DVD format into European households. Over 1,000 movies are expected to be available worldwide on HD DVD before the end of the year. Big name movies like The Matrix and Bourne trilogies, Transformers, and Shrek the Third are exclusive to the format, as well as TV shows such as Star Trek: The Original Series, Battlestar Gallactica, and Heroes.
But no matter how many figures the respective format backers throw out, we still have a few more months to endure this format war. With the Christmas season now approaching us, players of both formats should start flying off of the shelves and, hopefully, a winner will finally emerge from the dust in the beginning of 2008.
All of this brings up a question I have for all of you: Do you watch DVDs on your games console? And if so, how often? Hop on over to the forums and let us know by voting in the poll.
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Comments (28)
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In the UK there are only the Toshiba stand alone HD-DVD players on sale compared to Blue-Ray players from Pannasonic, Pioneer, Sony, Samsung and LG. The PS3 via its software updates is holding its own against the stand alone players while being cheaper. DVD play back on the PS2 how ever was appalling so its not much of a comparison.
come on if you had to do blu-ray would it be a £800 player or a £300 player?....... but then again sony keep upgrading the (so called) blu-ray standard that its better ecomony to buy a PS3 now then another one in year and still have change!
I'll give them the fact that a good portion of PS3 owners don't know or care about the Blu-Ray functionality of their consoles, but if we had reliable statistics on the number of PS3 owners who planned on using it as a Blu-Ray player as well as a gaming console, I think the numbers would still favor Blu-Ray.
If only...
:)
It's a kind of perverse perpetual motion. ;) Same with politicians. :)
...
If I go one or other format, it'll likely be Blu-ray as it's an 'extra' with the PS3. I used my PS2 to play DVDs for a while, but then it wasn't hooked up to the greatest TV in the world, so I doubt I'd have been able to tell the difference in quality between a PS2 and a standalone DVD player.
I'm currently thinking of picking up a 60GB PS3 before they vanish - while I've still got a functioning PS2, the ability to play some games upscaled would be nice...
"No, I play them on my (HT)PC"
:? BR has 58% of the market share in terms of software being sold versus HD's 42% even with a little more expensive hardware, and The BR camp has the majority of the major studios either exclusive or format-neutral. I don't think they are being defeated anytime soon.
I still think this whole thing is ridiculous as a consumer. Of course, that's an understatement.
it is an BD player
play games
use the internet
it can Fold@home very fast
does not sound like an hover (Xbox360 with there intercoolers heh)
other + to BD disks Start at 25gb per disk 50gb for dual (75gb maybe 100gb later on but cost of the disk not be worth it be cheaper to just by an 250-500gb hdd)
what can HD do just play movies and smaller disk size and as well on the computer side i have Yet to see an HD-DVD burner for sale, for an pc yet
but... well... i need to win the lottery first....
as for the whole blu ray vs. hd-dvd story... currently the biggest amount of sales comes through movies they give away for free in bundles with hw anyway....
i think simply not enough people can afford a hd tv of a reasonable size + stand a lone player + decent speakers.... because one without the others is rather pointless so both have rather big problems with the mass market.
I recall my first DVD...one of 4 titles available at the time, the original release of The Crow. I paid 35 bucks for it. I paid a grand for my first tabletop player. What a POS. I mainly used my 1x DVD-Rom drive on the compy...I think it was a 350mhz P2. Loved that thing except for the slot type. Kept falling out of the slot while I would poke around in the case while on (don't do this...lol). It was a beast for the time. :D
The format war will be decided by stand alone players and the what movies are available.
Completely un-interested in blu-ray and hd-dvd at the moment.
I was saying if they were to be defeated. Same with HD DVD, because that has exclusives with Paramount, if you want HD Paramount stuff, you'll need HD DVD.
It's all irrelevant though, HD still has very little uptake, it's still in the minority. Pretty much anyone with a TV could use DVDs, that's why it got adopted well, it was obviously better than VHS, and the benefits could be felt by anyone with a TV (basically everyone in the western world). HD formats however, only a small percentage of people can use properly, BR may be beating HD DVD slightly now, but they're still both getting creamed by DVD. There's also not a huge benefit to going HD, yeah, you can see more detail, that's nothing compared to the benefits DVD brought. Massive improvements to quality, compact, no rewinding, chapter skipping. Those were benefits the average joe using VHS could actually see and think was worthwhile, HD right now is just something fancy for younger people with lots of disposable income.
And anyway, if I were going with a new HD player, I'd go for a hybrid that could play everything, with all these exclusive deals, it's becoming more like the console wars, where if you want to watch a certain blockbusting film, you have to own a specific format, so a hybrid player makes sense for the consumer, it also means no one format will be absolutely dominant like VHS was/DVD is. Neither of them are gonna die, unless they both do due to lack of interest, as much as I think the increased disk sizes and higher resolution pictures are, it's a complete mess, with HDCP being revised every five minutes, etc.
I'm just gonna close my eyes until the explosions stop, then peek my head out to see which army won, then join them and say I was supporting them all along!! Really!
It will be that way for a long time to come.
Actually, I beg to differ a bit. Yes, the average schmoe going from VHS to DVD was a big jump. Some of us were using DVD's predecessor beforehand...VCD. It was basically VHS but in a digital realm. The jump was a big improvement when we all moved to DVD.
But-- HD, IMHO, is a vast improvement over standard-def discs just on a technical standpoint alone. We're talking more than twice the res, and anyone with an HD set (even an older one like myself) can see a major difference going from 480P to 1080I or 1080P. Hell, watching DVD's on an HD set makes them grainy (obviously) simply because they are literally half the res of what those TV's are capable of displaying (don't even get me started on cable TV!). Which was basically why DVD looked so amazing on standard-def TV's; i.e. 480P on a slightly lower-res TV.
The jump to HD is not much of one if you already had most of the hardware from DVD. If you already have an HD TV in some form and a decent surround system that can pass through PCM audio, you're golden.
The argument about the actual media cost is moot simply because the price is generally a few dollars more than standard DVD, especially when you get them on release day/week with sales/etc. I can speak from experience that I generally pay 21 dollars average for BR discs on release date versus 17 bucks for the DVD version.
The players, yes, that's an investment, but if you happen to have one of those games consoles, you're probably already capable of playing said media.
That's the only was to lessen the stink of BS that both these camps emanate in the air over their formats and still have the benefit of both.
I agree wholeheartedly with you about that. It is a complete mess. Regarding HDCP, it would be ignorant of them to not make any changes they instill backwards-compatible to current hardware via firmware upgrades.