Will prices now come down?

[vurbano]

Vurbano,

I'm still waiting for a dollar figure from you.

Im still waiting for at least a 6th grade understanding of the situation from you. You are asking a "what price will this have to be if This happens" type question. Go ask Nostradamos. The senario for mass adoption may never happen, how could you predict a price?.

 

[GaryPen]

When DVD came out it was compatible with every TV in existence.

No it wasn't. DVD players only had AV outputs when they first hit the market. At the time, most, or certainly a large percentage of, TV's only had RF inputs.

 

[vurbano]

No it wasn't. DVD players only had AV outputs when they first hit the market. At the time, most, or certainly a large percentage of, TV's only had RF inputs.

Thats why they used Rf modulators.

 

[tds4182]

Im still waiting for at least a 6th grade understanding of the situation from you. You are asking a "what price will this have to be if This happens" type question. Go ask Nostradamos. The senario for mass adoption may never happen, how could you predict a price?.

You started this discussion (in your post #57) when you disagreed with my estimated figure of $300.00.


I do agree with you that HD televisions need to become less expensive and penetrate the mass market before there will be a huge market for Blue Ray players.

The transition from analog to digital television next year should help speed up the process.

Time will tell.

 

[robre]

That future is BluRay and those who don't believe that it will overtake DVD are in denial. It's okay, if you want to watch DVD even upconverted and play like it is real HD then who am I to break your bubble. Toshiba did that for you yesterday.

I disagree that many are in denial. We are being realistic. Blu Ray can overtake DVD, I agree. They now have all the studio support and lost their only High Def media competition, but to overtake DVD before other technology comes out, whether it is download or something totally different, they need to get mass market acceptance, and that will not come with the current players and their prices, as well as the high cost of the disks. HD DVD and Bu Ray disks do look better than an upconverted DVD, but that difference may not be big enough to justify the cost difference. Just being better is not enough. A BMW is better than Honda, but I have to justify the difference in cost vs. what I would gain in quality to see if it is worth spending more. A lot of people who supported HD DVD and are familiar with the differences in features will wait for a Blu Player if they are not early adopters who do not mind spending top dollar on the latest and greatest. I think a lot of the HD DVD supports who want to go Blu have already gone to a PS3 or will shortly (which could explain some of the higher levels of PS3 sales over the last month or so), but the rest will probably wait a while. The average consumer does not know that much about HD, but one thing they will know is the price tag on the players, and until they get down to a lower price, most will not be taking the plunge. If we see some good quality Blu players at affordable prices and the studios start to drop normal prices on Blu disks, they can grow quickly. Until that happens, I do not think we are in denial. I think many Blu Ray supporters could be expecting too much. The real victory will come not just becuase the studios and retailers helped decide this war for the consumer and Blu Ray won. They just jumped the first hurdle, and a pretty expensive hurdle at that, at least to Sony, but it was only the first hurdle. The ones coming up may be even higher. Don't get me wrong, now that Blu Ray won, I would love to see it trounce DVD's quickly, as that would mean they got the prices down and I could jump in. I am not against it, I just don't see it happening for a while, and the longer it takes, the greater the chance it will never happen.

 

[Poke]

Yeah as the year goes on I think the prices will drop on Blu_Ray hardware due to more manufactures will produce more players now...

 

[nonrev]

robre first things first, BD has to over come the fact that 70% of homes don't even have a HDTV.

J6P who just scraped up enough money to purchase their first HDTV is not about to add an additional $500 acquisition. That 70% is the single biggest obstacle for BD over taking DVD.

 

[hbk409]

J6P who just scraped up enough money to purchase their first HDTV is not about to add an additional $500 acquisition. That 70% is the single biggest obstacle for BD over taking DVD.

thats why they can do the promos they have been running by a new tv get the blu-ray player free.

 

[mike123abc]

robre first things first, BD has to over come the fact that 70% of homes don't even have a HDTV.

J6P who just scraped up enough money to purchase their first HDTV is not about to add an additional $500 acquisition. That 70% is the single biggest obstacle for BD over taking DVD.

That does not stop them from buying BD and using composite out (on the PS3). How many HD cable and satellite boxes are hooked up this way to HD sets? Or even SD sets? It says HD it must be better...

 

[jayn_j]

That does not stop them from buying BD and using composite out (on the PS3). How many HD cable and satellite boxes are hooked up this way to HD sets? Or even SD sets? It says HD it must be better...

The lady at Comcast tells me that I can't use my HD-DVR without that little piece of coax to hook it up to the antenna input

80-90% of TVs in this town must be hooked up this way.

 

[allargon]

Vurbano, those guys that dropped into DVD in the begining are the ones that also dropped into BD and HD-DVD. Now that HD-DVD is out of the way it will not take long to see if BD is going to have legs beyound early adopters. BD obviously had the legs to take out HD-DVD now they are up against DVD. Gee, new technology or old technolgy -- can anyone name me the last time old tech replaced new tech?

Yeah... SACD/DVD-A and CD's...

Seriously, BD won't overtake DVD in sales. What will likely happen in a few years is the studios will say the growth curve shows DVD sales going down and BD sales going up or something like that and project/conclude/spoof/juke/whatever that Blu-Ray and its multiple layers of DRM are better than DVD and its two layers, then start phasing DVD out.

Blu-Ray players will come down in price. However, I doubt they will drop (sans HD DVD) as rapidly as DVD players did, since part of the mission of Blu-Ray was to return profit back to Japanese hardware makers.

 

[vurbano]

thats why they can do the promos they have been running by a new tv get the blu-ray player free.

You are not getting anything for free. You are overpaying for the TV by 500 bucks.

 

[JoeSp]

Yeah... SACD/DVD-A and CD's...

Seriously, BD won't overtake DVD in sales. What will likely happen in a few years is the studios will say the growth curve shows DVD sales going down and BD sales going up or something like that and project/conclude/spoof/juke/whatever that Blu-Ray and its multiple layers of DRM are better than DVD and its two layers, then start phasing DVD out.

Blu-Ray players will come down in price. However, I doubt they will drop (sans HD DVD) as rapidly as DVD players did, since part of the mission of Blu-Ray was to return profit back to Japanese hardware makers.

Good Point. I have not considered that the studios themselves could just decide that their money is in BD and just fade DVDs from the market. But we could be a good 4 to 5 years from that happening unless HDTVs can be purchased for $500 and BD players for $200. Then we should see mass acceptance by J6P.

 

[nonrev]

I doubt if BD has 4-5 years to get mainstream. The war between BD and downloading will be in full swing by then.

 

[JoeSp]

I doubt if BD has 4-5 years to get mainstream. The war between BD and downloading will be in full swing by then.

From most of what I have read about downloading HDM you will not own a copy. Seems that the HDM downloaded will either have a set time frame in which to view -- or a limited views set like 3 times and then it is gone. In addition, one must be where they can have access to high speed internet. Heck, we just got 1.5 DSL where I live and while there is cable .5 miles away I can have it installed for $3000! Maybe you can go with M$ idea -- that you use their proprietary products, their servers for storage, their settop boxes for access, their software for use, and you get to pay them a access fee or monthly fee!!: Oh my G!! Its XboxLive for all of us!!!

I personally like to own the movies I like so that I can watch them whenever and however many times I like. I love movies hence the reason my wife allows me to keep investing and upgrading my home theater setup. I am not sure if she is going to allow me to spend $3000 to get cable just so that I can get 6.0 off cable for downloading (especially when I would rather spend that $3000 on a new Mits Laser DLP this fall!). To her I can buy alot of HDM on disc for that price. And besides, HD on cable is crap! Of course if you live in a city that has been wired for optical this might work for you. At last count that was less then %5 of the entire country. No - downloadable HD content at full resolution, 1080p, and using TrueDoblyHD or DTSMasterHD is alot further off then 5 years. Heck it might be 10 to 15 years before it becomes viable enough to begin to replace HDM on disc.

And we are not even talking about the amount of HardDrive space one would need for say 200 movies in HD to be stored?

 

[navychop]

You forget Joe, the Magic Fairy is going to appear and give everyone BOPL running at a JiggleByte Per Second, all for free and overnight. And no one will care that the PQ & AQ is lousy, because they will all only have SDTVs in small sizes. People won't buy large HDTVs because they cost too much and always, always will! <stamp foot> And, of course, everyone knows that since HD DVD didn't make it, that means HD itself is dead, and upconverted DVDs are More Than Good Enough. No one cares about higher resolution or a wider color gamut. And most especially, no one at all cares about what movies sound like.

And, of course, nothing will ever, ever improve, gain new features or get less expensive. And studios, who are concerned about losing their DVD revenue stream, would never dream of doing anything about it! Why, no one will ever buy BDs because they can't copy them, and studios really don't care about their movies being pirated. Of course every Joe Six Pack, present company excepted, is vitally concerned about putting his movies on massive hard drives, while not being concerned at all about waiting hours for a download. OH that's right- he won't have to wait, there's the Magic Fairy.

And no one is concerned about paying to "rent" a movie by download. Heck, if you want to see it again, just pay again and download again!

Of course, there's only going to be one winner- it's downloads or it's ownership, never both. Remember how you used to own your car, before we all switched to renting/leasing?

Nope, all the major CE companies, studios, etc are stupid. They wasted all that money on HDM when any fool can see there's no future there at all. Microsoft, kindly, benevolent Microsoft, will ensure we all can download anything we want, using their rock solid software and for no money at all! Just a moment while we validate your software license.

 

[jayn_j]

I agree with everything Joe just said.

I also can't understand the excitement about downloading. This is something we should be resisting with all our might. In addition to what Joe listed, consider the following:

All carriers of downloaded, cable or satellite content have throttled back bandwidth to up the amount of content they can carry. Why do you think downloads will be any different? The internet is not free or of unlimited bandwidth, and if downloads take off, they could easily cripple the net.

The studios have spent years trying to get a PPV model going. They hate the concept of tapes and discs, even though they have historically been a big moneymaker.The studios want us to pay for every single eyeball, every time. They seem to feel that a DVD sale is forever, even though history has shown that we tend to repurchase them every time the technology changes. I do this less than most, but I have owned three copies of Star Wars. I know people who have bought that movie 6-7 times (VHS, Original time compressed LD, 2 disc DVD, CAV edition, letterbox edition, definitive THX edition, "New" content restored edition, DVD Box set). They will likely buy HDM once it is available.

Download content is likely to be just the movie. All these extras are enticements to choose this DVD over another.

Download is going to be in the format and feature set of J6P. No choice of audio codec, letterboxing, etc. In general Download is not going to be the choice for videophiles. Makes me kinda hope that this does stay niche.

 

[JoeSp]

Microsoft, kindly, benevolent Microsoft, will ensure we all can download anything we want, using their rock solid software and for no money at all! Just a moment while we validate your software license.

:haha:haha:river:haha:haha

 

[DanielD]

The price will come down now due to the production costs coming down per unit. Instead of making a 100,000 players they can schedule to produce a million as the competition is gone. Many people waiting for this to happen can rest assured the price of the players will come down in the next few months. I've waited this long so six more months is nothing.

 

[bsk116]

You forget Joe, the Magic Fairy is going to appear and give everyone BOPL running at a JiggleByte Per Second, all for free and overnight. And no one will care that the PQ & AQ is lousy, because they will all only have SDTVs in small sizes. People won't buy large HDTVs because they cost too much and always, always will! <stamp foot> And, of course, everyone knows that since HD DVD didn't make it, that means HD itself is dead, and upconverted DVDs are More Than Good Enough. No one cares about higher resolution or a wider color gamut. And most especially, no one at all cares about what movies sound like.

And, of course, nothing will ever, ever improve, gain new features or get less expensive. And studios, who are concerned about losing their DVD revenue stream, would never dream of doing anything about it! Why, no one will ever buy BDs because they can't copy them, and studios really don't care about their movies being pirated. Of course every Joe Six Pack, present company excepted, is vitally concerned about putting his movies on massive hard drives, while not being concerned at all about waiting hours for a download. OH that's right- he won't have to wait, there's the Magic Fairy.

And no one is concerned about paying to "rent" a movie by download. Heck, if you want to see it again, just pay again and download again!

Of course, there's only going to be one winner- it's downloads or it's ownership, never both. Remember how you used to own your car, before we all switched to renting/leasing?

Nope, all the major CE companies, studios, etc are stupid. They wasted all that money on HDM when any fool can see there's no future there at all. Microsoft, kindly, benevolent Microsoft, will ensure we all can download anything we want, using their rock solid software and for no money at all! Just a moment while we validate your software license.

Ha Ha. You should send this to Walgreen's, you know, the "perfect world" commercials.
Seriously though, I'm disappointed you forgot the magic pixie dust.