The war is raging between HD DVD and Blu-ray formats. HD DVD claimed the biggest sales in October with the release of Transformers as an Exclusive HD DVD title. Yet Blu-ray claimed the top HD format sales numbers for the first 9 months of the year and Blu-ray has some influential movie makers like Michael Bay betting it will be the format that wins. DailyTech reported yesterday that Wal-Mart was running a secret sale and one of the items in the sale would be the Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player for a mere $98.87. I recall going to my local Wal-Mart to get my Wii last year when they announced a shipment was coming in.
Wal-Mart had barriers set up outside and seats inside to keep the geek throngs from messing up the normal folks’ day that just needed some milk. I showed up at Wal-Mart this morning expecting to see lines of black-Friday proportions out front behind barriers and lines of people fighting to get their hands on the HD DVD players.
There were exactly no people waiting to buy the $98 HD DVD player. Several Wal-Mart employees were leaning on the display of 20 HD-A2 DVD players, all they had for the secret sale. While I stood there waiting for the Wal-Mart employees to get off the display so I could grab one I realized one of the guys seemed to be talking another shopper standing there into buying one of the players, repeatedly mentioning how good a deal it was.
The fact that people weren’t lined up in droves was frankly surprising to me. I wondered what did that mean. Does it mean that the Wal-Mart secret sale was just too secret? On the other hand, does it mean that even at under $100 people still aren’t willing to jump on the HD DVD bandwagon.