"The universe is hostile, So impersonal. Devour to survive." - Tool

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The first reports indicated that Wal-Mart had ordered cheap HD DVD players. Then it appeared that it may have actually been Blu-ray Players (see update on previous link). Now, it appears that they are just shopping around.

The $299 price point doesn't make sense for HD DVD. They're already down to $399. Once the Chinese market gets involved, low priced HD DVD players should cost about $150-200.

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Hell, I just got cable for the first time since Sasha Grey was born. What do I know about birthing formats?

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As hardly any gross-margin can be had from these hi-def formats with prices low as this (they're almost as low as the old-technology/ low product-development SD DVD), hardly any meaningful continuing R&D can be done on it (and return-cost for made R&D-expenses is near zero still). For a product this soon in it's lifecycle to be of this low a profitability/ viability for manufacturers (it's a marketing 'premature-dead'), can only speed up the introduction of a new format, on which the manufacturers will try again to make/ maintain profit. All the while, quality of product, of the players and the content, is deemed to stay unprovided for, making for a lowering of productgroup-satisfaction (aka. lessening of interest for A/V-related items altogether). The new formats to be development will so be of lower total-profit, and thus of lesser overall quality: thank God for the LP (and, to a lesser extent, CD, the last substantially worked-out formats) ...

p_n

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basically, the best companies here have already decided that blu-ray has won, mainly because of PS3, and aren't wasting time with HD DVD.

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If so, that's pretty big. Didn't porn basically make the decision on Beta/VHS?

I'm going real general here as this isn't one of my specialty areas and I'm willing so say I don't know shit

"The universe is hostile, So impersonal. Devour to survive." - Tool

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Porn did help kill betamax. Sony did that all by themselves by not licensing the technology to anyone else.

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Blu-ray is currently outselling HD primarily due to the exclusive titles that they have (hell, the exclusive Blu-ray titles prompted me to buy a Blu-ray player to compliment the HD DVD player that I already owned). For titles that are available in both formats, the sales are pretty much neck and neck.

Also, I wouldn't count on all of the Blu-ray exclusive studios to remain exclusive. At last year's annual stockholders meeting, Disney CEO Robert Iger said that Disney would "probably publish in both formats."

If both formats stick around for a while, which it appears will happen, then it makes no economic sense for Disney not to support HD DVD as well as Blu-ray. After all, they have no stake in which format wins, (unlike Sony). Disney's only goal is to make money. Why cut off the format that has sold more dedicated players than the other?

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p_n

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I see no reason that Wal-Mart couldn't do cheap Chinese players of *both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Were one camp - say HD-DVD - to allow it the other would be forced to likewise meet that price-point for retailers such as Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart doesn't care; in fact they'd prefer it that way to play the camps off against each other to get lower costs. Wal-Mart has no reason to go with just one camp.

There are two major cost drivers in either player: the blue laser diode and (much less) the patent portfolio. Chinese manufacturers have no impact on either issue so to an extent that's a red herring.

What "Chinese manufacturers" means is that one camp is willing to greatly reduce the patent royalties to win (hoping to make it up over many years with a very thin royalty stream). "Chinese" just means they're starting right at the bottom and won't be undercut.

The same diodes are used for both schemes so there is no advantage. These are still *very* expensive to make. I'm not sure the diode alone can made for $150 today much less an entire player. The player makers are subsidizing the cost of the diodes (the cheapest way to get a blue diode laser is to buy a player and gut it). But there's a lot of work going on 24/7 on it and it will be solved very soon.

PS. The Machiavelli in me wants to note another motive here. The Chinese government has plans to produce their own hi-def format to avoid paying large patent royalties to western companies. By quickly moving large-scale player production into China with greatly reduced royalty rates the HD and/or Blu-Ray camps may be able to undercut development of a Chinese standard, again hoping to make it up on a longer, thinner royalty stream by capturing all those hi-def players sold to Chinese consumers over the next 20 years... This is probably a good idea *IF* they can hold their patent portfolio groups together.

PPS. What porn companies do or don't do will have no impact on which format succeeds.

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Your friend may have been referring to what some particular player could do, or perhaps the up-res strategy of a particular player when a standard-def DVD is inserted.

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There's a Enhanced Versatile Disc High Definition, EVD-HD, already (using red laser BTW), announced at CeBIT in March 2006 by New Medium Enterprises and Beijing E-World Technology, and openly supported by the Chinese government. SD-EVD players are quite common already in Asia, and HD-EVD will be tomorrow.

Is HD DVD mutilated and BD dead? Did mutilated CD (VCD) kill DVD? No. When manufacturers will only make very thin profits, as in a 'Wal Mart'-like situation I already gave my POV on, than indeed HD DVD and BD will soon give place to EVD-HD. When taking away demand (the 'buying' out of the 'buying- and manufacturing-power') a product will fail. EVD sells (EVD-HD probably will too), so it's up to consumer to decide on HD DVD and BD, not up to the manufacturer.

p_n

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Personally, I would prefer that all movies were available in both formats, the players and discs were sold based on the cost of quality manufacturing and then the consumers would be who actually gets to choose which format wins.

That's what happened with VHS vs Beta (even if the format with the lesser picture quality won). The consumers chose VHS because of the longer run time of the tapes, the lower price of players due to competition and, to some extent, the fact that porn was available on VHS (not because of some outside force enticing porn companies to put their product on VHS, but because Sony made it a hassle to do so on Beta).

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Who will win the current war? Probably none, neither format offers enough bang for the average joe blow to upgrade. My bet is on silcon based memory cartidges, no moving parts, that's still ten years out though.

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It annoys me to no end that the CE-companies couldn't combine the highest capacity physical media with the most advanced consistent high-res codec for a single killer application. A hybrid-player would be an understandable way of dealing with this, on this day in time: LG's BH-100 is a nice try, though not fully embracing both formats, but maybe Samsung's BD-UP5000 kicks off 'hybrid' for real?

p_n

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