The truth about Hd-dvd

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By Henning Molbaek

FIRST ONLINE Jan 28, 2008

Toshiba says that it will use Super Bowl XLII to promote HD DVD with an ad during the telecast on February 3rd.

Jodi Sally, VP of marketing for the Toshiba Digital A/V Group, said that the 30-second TV ad will highlight the HD-A3, HD-A30, and HD-A35 players.

A 30-second spot at this year's Super Bowl will set you back $2.7 million, and the Blu-ray camp considered buying as well because a spot with 50% off normal price opened up. However, they could not assemble an ad in time, according to sources close to the group, and said no.

Last year, close to 2 million people bought HDTVs just to watch the Super Bowl according to "Sports Illustrated." The show was the most watched in the U.S. last year with more than 93 million viewers according to AC Nielsen.

Source: Home Media Magazine.

HD DVD gain in market share after huge drop.

By Henning Molbaek

FIRST ONLINE Jan 29, 2008

The latest NPD numbers shows HD DVD gaining back some of the lost market share in the week ending January 19th.

As we reported yesterday Blu-ray owned week 2 with 92.53% market share according to numbers from NPD.

The numbers from week 3 (ending January 19th) had HD DVD gaining some the lost ground back. HD DVD had 34.37% against 65.63% on the Blu-ray side.

Lastly, Stephen Baker, vice president of the NPD, has said that to base sales trends on weekly sales is very uncertain. So, please interpret the data accordingly.

Please note: NPD figures do not include sale from online giant Amazon.com and the data is based on standalone player sales excluding the Playstation 3 and XBOX 360 HD DVD add-ons.

And lets not forget that the above results DO NOT include online sales from Amazon, where the HD DVD Player is ranked number 1 & number 2 on Amazon.com DVD players Sales Rank & has been since December 2007.

It's currently Number 1 on Amazon.co.uk and Play.com.

im sure the results after week 4 will be even larger gains for HD DVD in hardware and in software.

And another thing I see is a lot of constant negative articles regarding HD DVD (type in HD DVD in google and then the news options to see for yourself), the same old stories appearing as 1 hour ago news from India, Ireland, to USA and despite that, figures released and Not released (online retailers etc) clearly show support for HD DVD despite all this negative bashing and 2 studio support. Nobody is giving HD DVD a fair chance to compete. If Sony does win this war it will be on a negative publicity campaign against HD DVD. If you start to repeat something a million times people will start to believe it.

[Post edited by mak247 on Jan 29, 2008]

The January movie doldrums continue this week with nothing incredibly spectacular in the few disc releases that managed to squeak through. It would have been this way even if Warner hadn’t chosen this week to start their “We’re going to screw HD DVD by putting out the movies three weeks later” policy (The Invasion should have come out today, but will come out in February instead). Interestingly enough, this policy caused them to modify their plans: Warner recognized that I Am Legend would probably sell reasonably well on HD DVD, and they had to extend their May deadline by a few weeks so that the movie would be available on our format. Huh? Isn’t that admitting that the format is worth releasing on?

I’ve referred to the smack talking against HD DVD as the “flavor of the month” before, and the most recent example of this has been fueled by leaked sales statistics from the NPD suggesting that Blu-ray players have a near complete hold of the market. In general, the NPD numbers are reported for longer periods of time like a month or quarter so that sales blips caused by special promotions don’t generate sensational news. In this particular case, someone with access to the weekly data leaked the information out, and everyone subscribing to the flavor of the month plan has fallen for the bait.

If you look closely at the numbers being reported, Blu-ray players saw an increase in sales by almost 4,000 units than the week before, while HD DVD players took a big nose dive. The HD DVD dip is not good news, but did these new Blu-ray sales come at the expense of HD DVD player sales? I’m sure many did simply because a person is either going to buy one or the other kind of player, but here’s more illuminating information released by Toshiba spokespeople just a short while ago:

As you may have seen, there are attempts being made to portray NPD’s weekly sales tracking figures for next generation DVD as a trend. We want to remind you and make clear that it is not accurate to make long term assumptions based on one week of sales - a cautionary point that NPD has made as well. The facts are that during the week that is being singled out, both Blu-ray disc players and software were being given away for free with the purchase of 1080p TVs. It is also important to note that the instant rebate promotions that had previously netted Toshiba’s players’ MSRP’s to $199 and $249 had actually ended on Jan. 5th - causing an increase in HD DVD’s MSRP back to $299 and $399 during that same week. Since Toshiba’s retail price move on Jan. 13th to $149 / $199 - Toshiba is seeing very positive sales trends at retail. This reinforces the fact that price is a significant driver of sales.

In other words, wait for more NPD reports and take a look at the bigger sales trends instead of weekly blips. Even NPD agrees.

Toshiba’s assertion is that consumers are cost-conscious and respond to sales and freebies. Hobbyists may be less price sensitive, but the general population is not, and they’re responding favorably to the HD DVD player price cuts.

In the weeks that Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. have had their two-for-one movie deals or player promotions, the corresponding HD DVD products have done really well. When those sales end, consumer buying habits return to normal. In the several months that I’ve been monitoring movie and player deals at this blog (which you can verify by going through the archives), the two-for-one movie deals only started around December, and HD DVD sales numbers did exceedingly well during those promotions. If one was to pick only those weeks of good news to report about HD DVD, then it’d be easy to say that Blu-ray was being trounced.

In the end, this is what the format war is all about. Numbers and statements go flying left and right, with each side able to figure out a way to show how they’re making a difference. Anybody who thought it was over can now be reassured that there’s still more coming.

Ken Graffeo plays dual roles in the HD DVD world: he’s the co-president of the North American HD DVD Promotional Group, as well as Executive Vice President of High-Def Strategic Marketing for Universal. Ken’s whole world is all about high-def and BetaNews.com was able to score a lengthy interview with him that brings out a great deal of much-needed insight into recent events with the format.

I’m only going to mention a few tid bits from the interview here, but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing over at BetaNews. Here are some of the highlights:

* Warner’s decision was completely unexpected and came out at the last minute while most of these execs were on their flights to Las Vegas. (This is also mentioned in a piece over at Gizmodo). There was no time to retool the HD DVD presentation for Sunday night at CES, and Graffeo didn’t want to put on a half-hearted effort that left too many questions unanswered, quote: “I hate to stand in front of someone and say I don’t have an answer, I don’t know what’s going on.”

* Graffeo asserts that all those initial rumors about Universal and Paramount were unsubstantiated, and that both parties plan to go on with “business as usual for us and there are no plans to make any changes…We also have a lot of other things planned.”

* While he can’t speak for other studios and what they might do in the future, Ken Graffeo reports that CES meetings with retailers were encouraging and that they openly said they’d wait for consumers to make the final choice. To that end, Graffeo talks about $85 up-converting players owning the market right now, and how consumers are very price sensitive. He also mentioned needing better consumer education on exactly what high-def is all about.

* Digital downloads will improve over time, but it’s not going to take over next year or the year after that because it’s not as plug and play as DVD players already are. Also, people like to collect and share, and they can’t do that with digital downloads. Consequently, physical media and disc ownership is going to be around for quite a long time. There’s plenty more to read and Beta News did a great job in landing this interview. Please head on over and see for yourself what Ken Graffeo had to say about reaching compromises with Blu-ray, CH DVD - the Chinese HD DVD format, and more. * Ken Graffeo interview at BetaNews.com

* Juicy info about studio support at Gizmodo.com

According to an article at The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount’s HD DVD release slate for the first quarter of 2008, originally to be unveiled at CES, will be presented on Thursday, January 17, 2008.

From past statements and educated guessing based on 2007 releases and delayed discs, we can pretty much guess what many of these movies are going to be, but the formal announcement should make things a lot clearer. For example, we can already guess that Beowulf, Bee Movie, Into the Wild, and Things We Lost in the Fire will be mentioned (since they’ve been mentioned before), as will an update on last year’s The Jack Ryan Collection which was recalled due to problems with the discs not containing any of the advertised bonus materials. We’ll report on the release slate after the information is made available.

Meanwhile, fellow HD DVD-exclusive studio, Universal, has been busy with a couple of movie announcements in the last couple of days. They’ve announced that the critically acclaimed, American Gangster comes to HD DVD on February 19, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age on February 5. They had also previously announced Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution for February 19.

Warner still has HD DVDs to crank out for at least the first half of the year, such as Invasion, and I Am Legend among others. As a side note related to Warner, it’s been reported that BBC titles will continue to be distributed on HD DVD. Though BBC discs are released through Warner, the BBC has some independence in asserting their support for HD DVD. After all, the BBC is not a Time Warner company — they’re just a studio that needed a local distributor for their discs, and the HD DVD version of Planet Earth has outsold its Blu-ray counterpart any way.

So that’s a little bit of a peek into the movies coming in the future. If all of that has whetted your appetite to pick up a few movies, you can click on any of the movie links above to get to the pre-order pages (if available) on Amazon. For more instant gratification, you can check out these sales on movies that are already out:

Straight-talking Seagate CEO Bill Watkins has told Wired magazine that Blu-ray's apparent victory over HD DVD is meaningless given that the future belongs to downloads rather than physical discs. "HD [DVD] versus Blu-ray... Well maybe Blu-Ray won, but it's a meaningless victory, because if you look at the CES show, there were devices everywhere, all designed to enable you to move and share content electronically. These were all storage devices - none of them had physical distribution of content," he said.

2008 has been a horrible year so far for HD DVD supporters and it's about to get worse. News has emerged that both Fox and Warner Bros planned to ditch Blu-ray in favour of HD DVD after Christmas - but then changed their minds just days ahead of CES 2008.

Money rears its ugly head, of course, with Warner Bros reputedly paid between $400 million and $500 million to go Blu-ray exclusive, and Fox $120 million, from Sony. However money wasn't the deciding factor, Gizmodo says, likening the amounts of cash involved to a drop in a bucket of a multi-billion dollar industry.

Warner's decision to switch allegiance had the biggest impact. For reasons never made clear, Gizmodo says Warner had a plan to support whichever format Fox did, and that a Fox executive had called Robbie Bach at Microsoft before Christmas to tell him Fox was going HD DVD exclusive. Sony managed to persuade Fox to stay its hand (along with the $120 million sweetener mentioned above), stopping Warner Bros in its tracks. However Warner Bros also seems to have reached its own conclusion, deciding that support for Blu-ray and HD DVD just wasn't viable - and that Blu-ray promised a better long-term business.

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Data firm NPD has issued a warning over leaked sales data that showed Blu-ray surging ahead of HD DVD in early January.

The data appeared to show a complete collapse in sales for standalone HD DVD players, and an increase in sales for Blu-ray despite both formats being neck and neck the week before. Many blamed the collapse on Warner Bros' announcement on Friday 4 January that it was dropping support for HD DVD.

However NPD says that a series of promotions run by Sony, Sharp and Panasonic in early January is the true cause of the sales boom. That's because all three firms either gave away a Blu-ray player - or heavily discounted the cost - when anyone bought a new TV. These 'freebie' sales accounted for 30 per cent of total Blu-ray stats for the week, with Blu-ray chalking up 21,770 sales in total compared to HD DVD's 1,758.

The 12 January totals also didn't include sales from online stores like Amazon, which has the Toshiba HD-A3 HD DVD player ranked 6th among HD DVD players and 14th among all electronics, Betanews says. Not one Blu-ray player makes it into Amazon's electronics list. The numbers also don't include sales of the Sony PlayStation 3 or HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360.

Blu-ray may be winning the format war, but the format itself is a bit of a mess - a constantly shifting sand of specifications that has left many critics to dub it a 'beta', not least its HD DVD toting rivals.

For in the last 18 months we've see BD-Profile 1.0, BD-Profile 1.1, and now BD-Profile 2.0 aka BD-Live which has been demonstrated here at CES 2008. Is it any wonder potential buyers are sitting on the sidelines when you have this, and a format war to contend with? Time for a tidy-up.

The first Blu-ray players to go on sale in 2006 used BD-Profile 1.0 - an interim standard that offered standard movie playback and little else. You could argue that anyone who launched a player at this time - along with anyone unlucky enough to buy one - jumped the gun by picking a player that wasn't fit for the mainstream. They were darn pricy too.

BD-Profile 1.1 or Bonus View, by contrast, is a final specification and mandatory on all new Blu-ray players. It adds a limited range of interactive features like Picture in Picture (PiP), plus 256MB of persistent storage so movie makers can add novel bonus features that should help improve your enjoyment of the movie.

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The catch comes, of course, when you try to play a BD-Profile 1.1 movie on a BD-Profile 1.0 player - unless you're very lucky and you've been rewarded with a firmware update for being such an early adopter, you're stuck with plain old movie playback. Harumph.

BD-Live explained

Now here comes BD-Profile 2.0 aka BD-Live. BD-Live includes all the features of BD Profile 1.1, but beefs up the persistent storage to 1GB. And it adds an internet connection so you can download additional content using suitable links in your Blu-ray movie's menu system.

The Blu-ray Disc Association used its CES 2008 press conference to demo how this might work. Sony Pictures showed how you could copy a ringtone from the movie to your phone, and how you get access to extras like movie shorts, etc.

20th Century Fox went further by talking about a whole social networking site that enables owners of the same movie to chat to each other over the internet, and discuss individual scenes while the movie is playing.

Sounds great. What's the catch? The catch is that BD-Profile 2.0 aka BD-Live is not a mandatory standard. It's up to Hollywood movie studios and hardware makers to decide whether to include such functionality or not - and upgrading your old Blu-ray player to take advantage of these features is all but impossible. You try adding an Ethernet connection and persistent storage retrospectively.

In fact the only Blu-ray player you can buy today that can or will be able to do all these things is the Sony PlayStation 3 - it had the hardware required from the get-go. Firmware updates are all it needs.

HD DVD: that's gotta hurt

The irony of all this, given the way things are panning out, is that HD DVD had all of these features - like internet connections, persistent storage, high levels of interactivity - mandated from day one. And that must really stick in your craw if you're a member of the HD DVD Promotion Group this week.

Unless, of course, you take the view that none of this really matters. You just want to sit down, sit back and watch a movie without constantly fiddling with the remote, faffing round with features you don't really need and actually enjoying the thrill of seeing the action on a big flat screen. That's how cinemas have survived every day for the last 100 years after all.
 
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Anonymous

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[quote user="nads"]now that is hard to read, why not just post the links if you cant be bothered to use the old formating trick.

Good to see HD DVD sales trippling in week 3.[/quote]
Sorry Boss.
 

Clare Newsome

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[quote user="burhan"] Nobody is giving HD DVD a fair chance to compete. If Sony does win this war it will be on a negative publicity campaign against HD DVD. If you start to repeat something a million times people will start to believe it. [/quote]

And the HD DVD group paying Paramount/Dreamworks to back their format was a constructive consumer move in what way, exactly?

I'm not defending the BD group: both format camps have been as bad as each other. It's a squabble that does a disservice to the entire consumer electronics and home entertainment industries.
 
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Anonymous

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[quote user="Clare Newsome"]
[quote user="burhan"] Nobody is giving HD DVD a fair chance to compete. If Sony does win this war it will be on a negative publicity campaign against HD DVD. If you start to repeat something a million times people will start to believe it. [/quote]

And the HD DVD group paying Paramount/Dreamworks to back their format was a constructive consumer move in what way, exactly?

I'm not defending the BD group: both format camps have been as bad as each other. It's a squabble that does a disservice to the entire consumer electronics and home entertainment industries.

[/quote]
These are not my words Clare.
I just agree with it thats why i included it.
Anyway i,v added more information have a read please thanks.
 

Andrew Everard

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So no truth in the speculation that such a prestigious slot during one of the world's most-watched sporting events might just have been booked many months ago, then?

emotion-5.gif


PS I put some para breaks in your endless post - just trying to read it was doing my head in
 
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Anonymous

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[quote user="Andrew Everard"]
So no truth in the speculation that such a prestigious slot during one of the world's most-watched sporting events might just have been booked many months ago, then?

emotion-5.gif


PS I put some para breaks in your endless post - just trying to read it was doing my head in

[/quote]
Thanks Andrew.
 

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