HD DVD defies death as Wal-Mart sells-out of Toshiba’s HD-A3
Filed under: Electronics, High Definition | By: Daniel
Posted on: February 8, 2008 | 37 Comments
It has become widely known that Sony Blu-ray is winning the high definition war, but someone forgot to tell HD DVD this as it defies the slow death of the format and starts selling out of the Toshiba HD-A3 HD-DVD player on Wal-Mart.
The HD-A3 has now been handed to consumer in the masses, this can only help HD DVD, but by how much as Blu-ray keeps outselling its competitor.
VideoScan reports that during the seven days between Jan 7 and Jan 14, Sony Blu-ray has closed the gap by 7% of total discs sold since inception with HD DVD. It looks like the two formats could be at disc sales parity within weeks if this trend continues.
Source: blorge
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HD DVD can sell as many units as they want, what you fail to mention is that there are hardly any studios left that are backing HD DVD which means that there aren’t going to be as many movies to buy in the format so you basically have a dvd player and thats it. Toshiba could sell 1 or 1 million units and it wouldn’t change the fact that they only have limited studios backing them and I’m sure that the people who are buying these units probably have no idea what the situation with HD DVD and Blu ray is at the moment
Very good point…S Berry
What is most interesting to me is the sales info. If Blu Ray is the all conquering format, why have consumers bought more HD DVDs? We all know Blu Ray has been playing catch up from a technical point of view (PiP functionality etc) but with all those PS3s out there, is no one buying the movies? Seems to make no sense…
And as long as BD is priced above 149.00, and the profile still below 2.0, your average consumer is not going to show much interest in BD. By Xmas, if HD -DVD is still alive and prices are $99.00, which pricepoint do u think is attractive to the masses(ignoring obvious studio support?) Anyways both formats are doomed from day 1. Toshiba is rumoured to have a secret weapon called Super upconversion in the works, and may change the way we think about normal upconversion. The technique has been used in astronomy, and is very interesting:
http://forums.highdefdigest.com/showthread.php?t=38889#post679677
Read your “source” again by Matt Jansen at BLORGE.com:
“Searching for the HD-A3 on Walmart.com (not an affiliate link) tonight I saw “OUT OF STOCK” in the upper right.” That’s your source - some guy checking online stock?!?
And that last paragraph about gap closing is from a highdefdigest.com article from THURSDAY FEBRUARY 1, 2007 !!!
HD-DVD at the moment actually has more titles actually released on disk.
The equivalent model in the UK is currently sold out as well since the price drop. If the sale of the players continues to sell well then the studios will just switch camp… Again! It’s like playing musical chairs.
to s berry,
although you are correct that there are more studios releasing for blu-ray-you fail to mention that the two that release on hd-dvd are very large studios. universal and paramount account for 43% of the total amount of content available. so the amount of movies available to each format is not that one-sided. plus we all know how fast studios can flip-flop on which format they will release on. some say content is king-some say price is king. we shall see.
True Berry, but HD-DVD can be used to play regular DVDs so with a price cut a lot of people will not see it as a waste if HD-DVD loses, and it’s upconversion is amazing. Now that Universal and paramount are coming up with a lot of Dual format DVDs, HD-DVD may actually start outselling Blu-Ray (even though not all sales may be for use with an HD-DVD player. Eventually if there are more players and people are buying movies, Studios are going to shift. They always follow the money
Studios will go where the money is - if the consumers have and are buying hd dvd players - the studios will want thier products in the consumers hands and they will start to release on the hd dvd format. If people have the players and the studios realize they are not selling the blu-ray to the people that have hd dvd - they will pay attention.
To S Berry
Uhh…if Toshiba could sell 1 million that would KILL Blu-ray on the spot. Because even thought Blu-ray is hugging the movie studios. Eventually they’ll be paying attention to HD DVD more.
You know why Blu-ray is selling? One reason and One reason only!
PS3 Fanboys. Since their ludicrous console isn’t offering a large library of video games what else is there to be done? Yeah, watch Blu-ray movies. They’re the factor in this war. The average consumer at this time doesn’t care about Blu-ray or HDDVD.