Sony To Release Hi-def Movies -- With No Players

[Ilya]

In an announcement that left many analysts scratching their heads, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment President Benjamin Feingold announced Wednesday that the company will release its first batch of movies on high-definition Blu-ray discs on May 23 -- even though no players will be available at that time on which to play them. Sony has indicated that the first players may not be available until November. In an interview with Home Media Retailing, Feingold said, "We realize there may be some delays on the hardware side, but we are going to honor our commitment to release movies when we said we would." Questions immediately arose concerning what retailers will do with the disks when they receive them. Said Feingold: "There are two schools of thought: A dealer could have them for publicity purposes, to prime the market, or we can ship them later, when hardware is on the market. But the important point is, we can meet the date -- that's the key."

Source: www.contactmusic.com

 

[Ilya]

Samsung was supposed to release its Blu-ray player in May, but is now expected to release it in June. However, there is a good posibility that computer BD drives will appear earlier than that, perhaps as early as in April. In that case May software release will at least make some sense.

 

[mike123abc]

Considering that they are shipping media for the computer drives ahead of the drives themselves, shipping movies ahead of the players seems to be a trend.