|
|
Wal-Mart chooses HD DVD
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 26th April 2007
Could Wal-Mart be the one to decide the format war?
Over the past couple of days, the retailer's plans for massive shipments of at least two million very affordable HD DVD players from China leaked onto the web. Wal-Mart is planning to bring these low-cost players to its stores in time for the Christmas 2007 rush.
In the past, DVDs and CDs have been a massive traffic builder for the company, as it heavily subsidised featured movies to get customers into its stores. Once these consumers were in the stores, most stayed to buy other things. However, back in November the retailer announced plans to launch a downloadable movie service for standard definition content.
Thus, it needs something to replace its major traffic driver before consumers stop coming to Wal-Mart for movies -- that something is, of course, high-definition movies. However, Wal-Mart can't start to use cheap high-definition media as a major attraction until it has to choose one format and fed its customers with a very affordable player to play these new movies on.
The leak indicates that Toshiba -- the company behind the HD DVD format -- has started licensing its technology to Chinese manufacturers for low-cost production. Indeed, the player that Wal-Mart is planning to sell, which is reportedly produced by Fuh Yuan, will cost well under $300 USD and may even be as low as $200 USD if speculation is to be believed.
Blu-ray players are simply just too expensive to make and the cheapest offering costs at least 50 percent more than the current cheapest HD DVD player. Because Wal-Mart is driven by aggressive pricing, Blu-ray just won't work in its business model unless Sony decides to license its technology to the Chinese at an affordable price.
So, despite Sony taking the early lead in the HD Format War, HD DVD looks set to be the long term winner. If you think back to the war between VHS and BetaMax, it was decided when JVC decided to widely license VHS at an affordable rate, enabling Far Eastern manufacturers to build budget players.
If this rumour turns out to be true, could history repeat itself again? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
Related
Comments (17)
Compare over 250 mobile phones &
52,000 deals!
Compare over 100 broadband & mobile broadband deals online!
- Site Links:
- About
- Email Editor
- Newsletter
- Privacy
- RSS
- Score Guide
- Our Other Websites:
- Auto Express
- Channel Pro
- Computer Buyer
- Computer Shopper
- Den of Geek
All content © bit-tech.net 2000-2009
© Copyright Dennis Publishing Limited licensed by Felden
(repeat above three times out loud and click your shiny red heels)
And Sony won't put Blue Ray out for the cheap until it's too late to make a difference (because everyone that's interested will have their slightly shiny cheap HD-DVD players sat under their TV).
never thought i'd give a compliment to this of all companies but perhaps we have to thank wal*mart for this one.
as for ASDA following suit, there's not as much of an incentive to start pushing HD players so aggressively yet, since, well, nobody's really buying anything here. so they will, eventually, but only when people actually start to care about HD.
All jokes/flames aside -- if you put hd-dvd next to blu-ray, both on the same 1080p screen, can you actually see a difference between the HD quality of the two formats? Forget the logic of bits & bytes and 1's and 0's -- can you the human see the diff? (I have the x360 hd-dvd drive but only connected up via component so no 1080p yet -- only PS3 BD)
Reason I ask is, whether to continue collecting BD discs or hold and wait until the X360 Elite is out with proper 1080p hdmi.. Hmm
Theres not a lot to choose between the two formats quality wise you get some bad quality and good quality transfers on both formats they are both MUCH better than DVD though especially if you have a large HDTV the downside is that there appears to be a trend where the extras aren't as good on the HD discs versus the SD discs which is a bit of a let down, these film companies really do get my back up with the whole 'Extended edition' thing, as a collector of the odd film I really hate the fact that a film is released and then a better varient is release 6 months down the line to cream some extra cash, means I now just wait and see all the time rather than actually buying something, well I wouldn't want to buy it twice.
There is no need for retailers to be able to push through very large bulk to make a profit; there are many internet companies who can subsist on selling small number of each player. There are plenty examples in the marketplace now of competing, incompatible products that have not seen a clear "winner". Furthermore, whilst it is clear that one standard will eventually die first (not many things happen simultaneously in this universe), it could be very many years before that happens, and after both formats have made decent profit for their owners.
I've seen both side by side oo two 46" Samsungs and to be quite frank I couldn't tell the difference what so ever, even 2 feet away from the screens. But I known would see the difference inside my wallet, making HD-DVD the logical (financial) choice.
Most people who would choose price over quality (i.e., the masses shopping at Wal-Mart) aren't likely to spend the money for a good, quality display. They won't be able to tell the difference between BR and HD-DVD.
In my opinion, it comes down to price first, then storage capacity.
-monkey
However, konsta has a point - the market and distribution system is much bigger than it was when beta died.
I don't think Walmart will cause a major shift in the format war, but they will cause major confusion with the average uninformed buyer. Of course, most people will just hook up a coby dvd player to their "expensive" 400 dollar hdtv via composite and think thats as good as it gets. Like I said, the major confusion will mostly be people trying to play hddvd and bluray in their regular player. We may soon get sick of the walmart electronics clerk asking us if we have the right player for the type of disc we picked up.