HD-DVD ad during the Superbowl
Isn’t it fun to watch a company refuse to admit it lost a battle? No? You’re right, it’s just pathetic.
Apparently Toshiba has just paid $2.7 million bucks to place an ad for HD-DVD in this Sunday’s Superbowl. Toshiba has been cutting prices of it’s players and convincing others to drop the price of their players as well (most likely paying them the difference in cost to get them to play ball.) The ploy is obvious.. HD-DVD is considerably cheaper than Blu-ray at this point and Toshiba hopes it can turn it’s fortune around in the HD battles.
What they are ignoring is the obvious, consumers could care less what format wins as the picture quality and sound are identical, what consumers care about is selection. Come this summer when folks are looking to upgrade their players to HD, they’re going to notice that the movies they want to see are available in Blu-ray and not HD-DVD. It doesn’t matter if the HD-DVD players were on a Wal-mart endcap at $49.95, if there’s nothing to play on it it just doesn’t matter.
Toshiba lost this battle, now they’re just throwing good money after bad.
Hopefully the commercial will be funny though, I hate serious Superbowl commercials.
Update: Apparently Toshiba couldn’t get their act together in time to get the ad aired. I wonder if they got a refund?
Universal adds their own nail to the HD-DVD coffin
Universal Studios has decided (big shock) to begin supporting the Blu-ray HD format, in addition to HD-DVD. That leaves only Paramount as an exclusive for the HD-DVD camp, though that might not last much longer.
Oh, HBO Films jumped on the Blu-ray bandwagon earlier today too, not that anyone noticed.
As we’ve been saying, HD-DVD is dead dead dead. Now if Sony would just lower the price of the Playstation 3 a wee bit we’d get one. But that’s not likely, as shortly after the Warner Bros. announcement Sony actually raised the MSRP of it’s cheapest Blu-ray player from $299 to $399. Just lovely.
Microsoft adds another nail to the HD-DVD coffin
In the beginning it was a weapon in the console wars… Microsoft used HD-DVD, Sony used Blu-ray. Microsoft took the controversial tactic of making their player an add-on device, meaning that the vast majority of their users would not have it and thus, it was not considered a huge deal to the HD-DVD crowd.. while Sony made Blu-ray standard on all PS3’s.
This hurt Sony in the beginning since it caused the PS3 to be much more expensive than the Xbox 360, but Sony was thinking “war” while Microsoft was thinking “battle”.. or perhaps Microsoft didn’t really care either way as they were concentrating on games instead of movies (Sony being a movie studio and owner of the Blu-ray format had a lot more of a reason to push the PS3’s non-gaming abilities.) If Microsoft had really cared about which HD format would win, they would have gone with a built-in player and helped increase the HD-DVD market share.
It seems Microsoft might have been smart to concentrate more on games and to keep their HD movie player as an add-on as they’ve gained much more market share than Sony, and since the player is external they can change formats at will. Microsoft alluded to that today when Albert Penello said “It should be consumer choice; and if that’s the way they vote, that’s something we’ll have to consider” after being asked about Blu-ray support in the Xbox 360.
You know it would pain Microsoft to pay royalties to Sony to use the Blu-ray technology in any way on the Xbox, but it’s nice to see they are willing to do what’s best for the consumer. It’s also smart business. Offer both options for the 360 and suddenly you neutralize Blu-ray as a weapon in Sony’s PS3 arsenal.