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Black Friday sales boost HD DVD base to 750,000 strong

With the rapidly falling price of HD DVD players, it’s no surprise that many consumers are finally making the jump to high-definition. Apparently, HD DVD had a strong enough Thanksgiving shopping week to warrant the North American HD DVD Promotional Group to issue a press release announcing a sales milestone.

Thanks to incredible pricing on Toshiba HD DVD players leading up to Black Friday, total sales for HD DVD players in North America have exceeded the 750,000 mark. The data is based on retailer reports and other point of sale data, and includes standalone set-top players as well as the Xbox 360 HD DVD player, said the HD DVD Group.

"HD DVD continues to gain momentum and market share with consumers," said Ken Graffeo, executive vice president of HD strategic marketing for Universal Studios Home Entertainment, and co-president of the HD DVD Promotional Group. "With more than four weeks left for holiday shopping, HD DVD is turning out to be a perfect consumer electronics gift."

Prices of HD DVD players started to plummet when retailers such as Wal-Mart, Circuit City and Amazon.com began to sell the Toshiba HD-A2 player for under $200. Wal-Mart upped the ante even further by offering the same player for $98.87 during an in-store special secret sale. Best Buy matched the sale and went the extra mile and offered the newer HD-A3 in place of sold out HD-A2 sales.

While the HD DVD Promotional Group isn’t releasing specific sales information just yet on its Black Friday performance, it’s known that Toshiba sold 90,000 HD DVD players during the first week of November thanks to the new low prices.

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The rest of the story
By tallcool1 on 11/28/2007 9:00:41 AM , Rating: 3
I read this yesterday at tgdaily.com.
tgdaily article concludes with:
quote:
According to the HD DVD Promotional Group, standalone players have outsold standalone Blu-ray devices, which excludes the Playstation 3. The Digital Entertainment Group agrees, reporting that standalone Blu-ray player sales have not even reached 200,000 units yet. However, when the PS3 is factored in, Blu-ray dwarfs its competitor.

According to the Financial Times, PS3 lifetime sales have reached 3.7 million units. This has led to Blu-ray movies consistently outselling HD DVD titles, usually at a monthly rate of two-to-one.




RE: The rest of the story
By Chaser on 11/28/2007 9:08:06 AM , Rating: 2
At this point I think a substancially cheaper standalone BR player would pretty much close this deal. One that would be cheaper than the entry level PS3, around $250.00? Just a thought.


RE: The rest of the story
By Pale Rider on 11/28/2007 9:19:56 AM , Rating: 1
If Blue-Ray is outselling HD-DVD 2 to 1 they need a cheap stand alone player fast to put the nail in the coffin. If they were to offer one for $99 like HD-DVD has then more people would pick them up.

Personally I don't care who "wins" or why one is better than the other (because I tend to think regular DVD is just fine). But I won't spend a penny upgrading until one format "wins".


RE: The rest of the story
By Chaser on 11/28/2007 9:35:05 AM , Rating: 2
Nor do I. I could care less about brands, names, manufacturers or whatever. The highest capacity is the only factor to me.


RE: The rest of the story
By mdogs444 on 11/28/2007 9:41:09 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
The highest capacity is the only factor to me.

Thats really kind of a moot point seeing as how it doesn't really matter whether you can fit 10, 20, 30 ,50 etc GB on a disc, when all they have to do is add more layers.

So something like the storage space argument, that really has no bearing on the high definition quality of the video and audio, should be the least of your concerns.


RE: The rest of the story
By bplewis24 on 11/28/07, Rating: 0
RE: The rest of the story
By mdogs444 on 11/28/2007 9:58:23 AM , Rating: 4
And the cost of producing sony's BD-DVD is greater than producing the HD-DVD. But what you guys are saying is that price doesn't matter, its the storage capacity you get.

But now, you turn around and say the storage is what matters, because its more expensive to create layers?

Pick a side, it doesnt really matter because its a moot point argument - that only plays a definitive role in the PC storage industry. When you are using them for High Defintion video & audio content to be played in a DVD player - the storage capacity has proven not to matter because the movie quality is still the same.


RE: The rest of the story
By bplewis24 on 11/28/07, Rating: 0
RE: The rest of the story
By blaster5k on 11/28/2007 11:52:20 AM , Rating: 5
Sure, you might be able to get lossless audio in there more easily, but is that something you're really going to notice while watching a movie? DD+ already offers 7.1 sound with less compression than DD5.1 and DTS. And does a slightly better video compression rate really have a big impact on quality? The rate is already high enough with more efficient codecs like VC-1.

Consumer Reports recently tested a bunch of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players and came to the conclusion that they were basically the same in terms of perceivable quality. This would imply that storage capacity is a moot point -- as far as video quality is concerned.

Extra space might make it possible to fit more TV episodes per disk or avoid splitting long movies in some cases. It might be beneficial to people backing up data, though a triple layer HD-DVD may be more cost-effective still than a dual layer Blu-Ray disc -- hard to say at this point.

I think it boils down to cost though. Blu-Ray is a more radical departure from DVD and carries a higher cost. Are the benefits worth that extra cost? That's the real question I think.


RE: The rest of the story
By bplewis24 on 11/28/2007 2:31:27 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Sure, you might be able to get lossless audio in there more easily, but is that something you're really going to notice while watching a movie? DD+ already offers 7.1 sound with less compression than DD5.1 and DTS. And does a slightly better video compression rate really have a big impact on quality?


Unquestionably, yes.

And I love how people keep quoting this Consumer Reports study that said the players were "basically the same" even though the average rating was 87 for Blu-ray players and 81 for HD DVD players. Yes, that is basically the same isn't it? The spin on that article has been tremendous.

Brandon


RE: The rest of the story
By DrKlahn on 11/28/2007 3:00:30 PM , Rating: 2
Unquestionably false. Neither VC-1 nor MPEG4 AVC need compression rates exceeding that available to HD DVD.


RE: The rest of the story
By Locutus465 on 11/28/2007 3:13:19 PM , Rating: 2
Of course a good studio will always try to include a Dolby TrueHD track which is every bit as good as PCM. Paramount is finally doing this with the Star Trek Season 1 discs, Warner has been doing this for a long time now. Dolbe Digital + is alright, but TrueHD is preferable and really there's no reason in the world why an HD-DVD disc should exclude it (other than old remastered films originally dubbed in mono or stereo).


RE: The rest of the story
By rockyct on 11/29/2007 6:58:28 AM , Rating: 2
Cost is only an issue when buying the player. The cost of the Blu-ray disks vs. HD-DVDs are basically the same to consumers. Blu-ray disks may cost a little more to make, but they don't really charge more for them.


RE: The rest of the story
By DigitalFreak on 11/28/07, Rating: 0
RE: The rest of the story
By Moishe on 11/28/2007 10:01:02 AM , Rating: 4
Capacity is not everything. If it were and if price was no object like Sony seems to think, they they could just sell ultra high super-duper definition movies on 1TB Seagate drives.

If any HD movie and it's extras can fit on both HD-DVD and BRD than the larger capacity of BRD is pointless precisely because movies is what we're talking about here.

If we were talking about the amazing new data storage media, BRD would win but movies are defining this format war, NOT storage.

For every techie who cares about storage size, you will find 1 million regular consumers who don't know (or care) and just want to watch the movie.

As a techie myself, I ceased caring about optical media a long time ago and I simply use hard drives now. 50GB on an optical disc makes no difference to me.


RE: The rest of the story
By BansheeX on 11/29/2007 12:02:13 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
If it were and if price was no object like Sony seems to think


BRA is steadily dropping prices to maintain a for-profit model. Toshiba can firesell for a day at $100 and give you the perception of a more "consumer-friendly" format. It is inherently less costly to manufacture HD-DVD, but I challenge your contention that BR's storage capacity has no benefits over HD-DVD for movies. HD-DVD is already running into disc space issues as studios are having to choose between lossless audio and bonus material, even on the flagship transformers release. Only a minority of releases feature better audio tracks than their DVD counterparts. If you're going to invest $1000 into upgrading all your DVDs, wouldn't you want to spend that extra $100 on a blu-ray player? If you consider yourself average and don't know or don't care, then why wouldn't you just buy regular DVD to begin with? It doesn't make sense to go halfway on next-gen for petty and short-term cost discrepancies. Have patience and support blu-ray.


RE: The rest of the story
By blaster5k on 11/29/2007 9:21:16 AM , Rating: 2
It's not true that a minority of releases have higher audio quality than DVD. Every HD-DVD release uses at least Dolby Digital Plus, which is a higher quality audio encoding than DD5.1 and DTS, which are used on DVDs. It has a higher bitrate and 7.1 channel sound. Many titles offer lossless audio as well.

For the cost of buying a Blu-Ray player now, I can buy an HD-DVD player instead and then a new Blu-Ray player in a couple years when its price finally comes down. Maybe Blu-Ray players will even support internet connectivity and other HD-DVD features by then. And maybe more of the releases will be updated to not use MPEG2 and single layer discs.


RE: The rest of the story
By FITCamaro on 11/28/2007 9:50:18 AM , Rating: 2