Blu-ray has 70% of 1st qtr sales?

Why are you suprised? Bluray has a lot of support, HD-DVD is just Universal and Microsoft against the world. Now that walkmark has announced this cheap chinese HD-DVD players i'm more confident that bluray will win the battle.
 
Sxotty said:
Yes without a doubt Microsoft does similar shenanigans (heh there is a fun word). But once again you have to be in a special dominant position to have the clout to accomplish that. I think we need more competitors in these markets to encourage innovation, not fewer.
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Which markets would that be?

What about USB what are the royalties for that? Was it free to develop just snap the fingers and poof? They are not trying to recoup investment, they are both trying to make a huge profit by fighting an unnecessary format battle.
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Well for starters the membership fee is like $4000 a year. That's a nice annual profit for the founders of the USB-IF when you have like 1000+ members (which is very conservative (it's probably more like several thousand). Plus specs and trademark licensing is $2000 for non-members.

Then you have the alternative (particularly for Intel who was the driving force behind it), and that was having to shell out money to Apple for FireWire royalties to implement a high speed serial bus instead of proliferating your own technology. Especially when a large portion of USB controllers on the market happen to come with your chipsets.
 
Yes. if pure specifications for standards were not patentable (abstract specifications shouldn't be patentable like physical inventions, specific chemical compositions like alloys with proven benefits, or manufacturing process based inventive steps), we wouldn't have this "push competing standards for royalties" crap, and things would be a lot cheaper, and interoperable.

In the past this was the case, and computer software and standards/abstract specifications were not the case, and according to US and EU statutes they are still not valid. However because of a court ruling in l lower court in the US, this is being ignored, and the US and EU patent office has been issuing patents for software and abstract specifications. Things have gotten even worse in both the US and EU when the patent offices were privatised and funded by patent application fees. The more patents the patent office approves, the more income it gets. Consequently patent offices have become an "approve anything submitted if you pay the fees" rubber stamping office.
 
archie4oz said:
Well for starters the membership fee is like $4000 a year. That's a nice annual profit for the founders of the USB-IF when you have like 1000+ members (which is very conservative (it's probably more like several thousand). Plus specs and trademark licensing is $2000 for non-members.
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That is optional

Then you have the alternative (particularly for Intel who was the driving force behind it), and that was having to shell out money to Apple for FireWire royalties to implement a high speed serial bus instead of proliferating your own technology. Especially when a large portion of USB controllers on the market happen to come with your chipsets.
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The 2k is for a two year agreement to use the logo. The FireWire royalties were going to be way higher than this as it was $1.00 per port and then changed to 25 cents per port. Compare that to $2000 for two years of making products.

Now a further note is that this shows precisely the point. When firewire had no competition they wanted to charge $1.00 per port then with competition the price dropped 75%. So why is competition good? That should be obvious.

That means the best thing that could happen for consumers might well be for HD-DVD and BluRay both to suceed and dual formats players to rule. then the media will be in at least some competition and people will buy what is cheaper. Unfortunately the players would be more expensive then.
 
70-30, continued over several quarters, might indeed be in range of "ending the war". Let alone if the separation continues to grow (75-25. . .80-20. . etc).
 
The point to chuck in HD-DVD will come only when no titles or only limited titles are available in shops and rentals because of the lower demand for it. Until then HD-DVD will struggle on. If Bluray is being sold in far larger quantities by far more competing manufacturers, then you can expect Bluray drives and Bluray media to be cheaper than HD-DVD in a year or two when the market is more mature and competitive.
 
I'd be very surprised if a long-term 60-40 is a knockout for anybody. That's more likely to result in a renewed push for reasonably priced dual-use players. I think it takes at least an extended period of 70-30 or greater. I think psychologically once you get into that >2-1 area long-term all different parts of the market chain from manufacturers, to retailers, to consumers, start getting a little surly about why you're hanging around mucking up their market certainty and start to take it out on you as they're able.
 
Dave Baumann said:
http://www.dvdempire.com/Content/Features/hidef_wars.asp

DVD Empire showed the 30/70 for a month, but over the past two months has gone back to 40/60, with currently this weeks advantage to HD DVD.

Interesting that the following the expected initial PS3 swing, its not gone further so far.
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Thanks for pointing that link out - it told me that BluRay release for Planet Earth is out, which is awesome! :) Ordered it immediately. I haven't seen it here yet, but I could order it from amazon.com no problem and it said all regions, so should be fine. Will have it later this week ... can't wait! My wife loves this even more than I do. :cool: And it's an awesome fit for hi-def.
 
Thanks for the link Dave... I have been looking for numbers like this.

But they only indicated their own sales (and eProductWar only shows Amazon sales).

The Reuter article about 70/30 split is for worldwide/nationwide distribution for week ending April 29 though.
 
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Yeah, that is weird Ty.

Anyway, assuming the DVD Empire data is fairly representative of overall sales, it looks like PS3 isn't going to deliver the knockout blow anytime soon. The initial rush of PS3 sales look to be over, so I think it'll take a while (over a year?) for PS3 total sales growth to really outpace the growth of HD-DVD standalone sales (percentage-wise relative to today) and deliver that knockout punch.

Cheaper standalone players should be around before then. That should determine the winner of the war. $200 should be low enough to start stealing sales away from DVD players over $100.
 
Mintmaster said:
Yeah, that is weird Ty.

Anyway, assuming the DVD Empire data is fairly representative of overall sales, it looks like PS3 isn't going to deliver the knockout blow anytime soon. The initial rush of PS3 sales look to be over, so I think it'll take a while (over a year?) for PS3 total sales growth to really outpace the growth of HD-DVD standalone sales (percentage-wise relative to today) and deliver that knockout punch.

Cheaper standalone players should be around before then. That should determine the winner of the war. $200 should be low enough to start stealing sales away from DVD players over $100.
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Given console volumes tend to be so holiday-bound (tho that factor will certainly apply to some degree to stand alone players, just not quite as much, I'd guess), it could be a pretty jerky progress so long as HD DVD stand alone players are cheaper than BR ones. Sort of LEAP (BR), NIBBLE NIBBLE NIBBLE (HD DVD), LEAP. . . rinse repeat. Tho at some point in there the stand alone players get cheap enough to probably dwarf PS3's impact. And, yeah, probably around $200 is going to that point. . .but available discs will weigh very heavily at that point, I'd think.
 
I dunno, it's hard to say which has sales better co-related to holidays. DVD players were probably similar near their launch. Lots of semi-luxury electronics seem to be that way, not just consoles.

Its clear that a typical owner of a standalone player buys a lot more movies than the average PS3 owner, or HD-DVD sales would be dead already. Really, there's only two ways for Sony to eliminate HD-DVD. Either they need to sell PS3's at about 10-20 times the rate of HD-DVD players (I think it's already something like 5-10 times, and BR is still far from dominant), or they need to get out a mass-market player out well before there's one for HD-DVD (not going to happen).

I don't see the former happening, so it doesn't look like the war will end before the standalones negate the PS3 factor. It'll take a good year or two before we get any indication of what the long-term trends would be. This 60-40 split right now is based on volumes that will increase dramatically soon and make this data irrelevant.
 
I'm considering the possibility that the production of millions of PS3s will help scale the costs of BluRay players. I think that if they want to, they can probably keep matching HD-DVD pricing in terms of hardware, should they want/need to. The most important thing for the BluRay platform is to get the Java / Live thing on the rails. I think that's their biggest challenge right now.
 
dibujodz9.png


HD-DVD Keeps falling.
 
archie4oz said:
As opposed to all those other proprietary pushing companies that would, could and do do the same thing...
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teehee, you said do do :)


Other than that, here in Kokkola, Finland I've seen plenty of Blu rays sold and I can even rent them. No sight of hd-dvd other than xbox 360 drive and king kong.
 
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