UPDATE: Some of the site issues mentioned in this post appear to be resolved. Visit this store via the following link:
http://stores.channeladvisor.com/inetvideocom/

Nowadays, most of the really big deals on HD DVDs are happening at European and Aussie sites, but in the last few days, a North American site has suddenly drawn a lot of attention for their $5.99 sale. The company is inetvideo.com and they’ve also been selling discs through eBay and Amazon’s Marketplace for a while. The catalog is largely (or perhaps only) composed of Univeral titles including The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and many others.

There are a couple of things you should know before heading over there. First is that the site goes down frequently because it’s running on a weak server — they didn’t expect so much demand from this HD DVD sale. Fortunately, they have live customer service people who can take your order, allowing you to bypass some of the server issues.

You’ll need to browse through the store to check out their selection, and make a list of the movies you’d like to order, adding them to your cart as you go along. If the stars are in your favor, and your online mojo is close enough to a peak, you’ll probably be able to order a bunch of discs with no worries. However, if you’re experiencing issues with the site, then just contact them via email at support@inetvideo.com or use their live chat feature and they’ll get everything squared away.

You can also bypass these server problems by going straight to their store on eBay, but the product listings are a little more tedious to navigate through, and the “buy it now” price is $7.98.

The other thing you should know is that shipping is around $2 per disc, and your final cost wil be around $8 for each movie. This is still a great deal because most of those movies are going for at least $13.95 at Amazon.

International shoppers trying to take advantage of their currency’s strength over the weakened US dollar might be taken aback by higher shipping rates, but it’s worth a look, just as it’s sometimes worth the effort for a US-based customer to check out foreign stores.

• iNetvideo.com – the main site
• iNetVideo’s store on eBay
• Page at their site listing their HD DVD movies, but not all are are at this $5.99 price

Now that the format war is over, some HD DVD owners are seeking out combo players as a way to keep their HD DVD collections viable while they transition to Blu-ray. If you’re in this group, then you may need to pay closer attention to pricing and availability of these models in the near future as Samsung and LG have both announced that the end is near for these machines.

In statements to The Korea Times, a Samsung spokesperson revealed that they already stopped making these units in February, and an LG representative said they’ll stop their dual-format efforts in the second half of the year.

Many months ago, people advised that purchasing a combo HD DVD and Blu-ray player would be a safe way to avoid getting stung too badly in the format war. The thinking was that you’d have a single player that could handle whichever of the disc formats eventually won, and always have the option to pick and choose the best discs in the formats that they happened to come out in.

One of the biggest problems with this approach was that buying a combo player would cost more than buying two players, one for each format. And in the beginning, the LG players only partially met the full HD DVD spec because they left out any web-enabled features.

In the last couple of months, prices on these players have come down quite a bit, and the more recent LG player model is now fully compliant with the HD DVD specifications. Except for the fact that they’re not going to be upgradeable to the latest Blu-ray spec, buying one of these machines is finally a more palatable decision.

If all you’re really looking for is a back-up machine to ensure that your HD DVD collection doesn’t go to waste, then you might want to consider the current sale at TigerDirect (who also now run CompUSA), where you can get an HD-A3 plus four movies for only $80. Two of the four movies are The Bourne Identity and 300, which already come with the player, and TigerDirect is throwing in Apollo 13 and Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift.

Besides that deal, you can also find many used players on eBay and Craigslist, or perhaps an “open-box” unit at an electronics store.

• HD-A3 Player Bundle at TigerDirect.com
• Samsung BD-UP5000 Dual-format player at Amazon.com
• LG BH200 Super Blu Combo Player at Amazon.com
• Samsung, LG End Combo HD DVD Player Line at The Korea Times

Star Trek Season 1 is only $49 at Amazon.ca. That’s the Canadian Amazon, but they do ship to the US.

Don’t worry about the exchange rate, because Canadian and US dollars are about the same.

Don’t worry about shipping, because even if it cost $20 or $30, this is still an amazingly good deal. (Shipping is actually closer to $10)

This box set normally went for around $130 on a good day and is currently selling for about $96 at the US store.

Go!

• Star Trek Season 1 at Amazon.ca

UPDATE: Pay with your American Express card and use code MAPNEWNCSAVE to save an additional $10. Try VISA10OFF40 with a Visa card. Seems that the codes aren’t working for everyone, but it’s worth trying. You might want to try doing it with a new Amazon.ca account.

According to a story at Engadget, lucky shoppers in Ireland can pick up Xbox 360 HD DVD players for the equivalent of just under $16 at stores like GameStop. Kotaku had reported earlier that the drives were going for twice that price in the US, but those were refurbished units.

Irish shoppers can also take advantage of the big sales at British DVD sites such as dvd.co.uk who are selling HD DVD titles, including American Gangster, for as little as £6.95, which is about USD $14 (shipping to the USA isn’t too expensive either). If you’ve been following this site recently, then you’ll know that prices from Australian stores have also been really great.

The format war may have ended, but these kinds of prices are compelling and an inexpensive way to get some good mileage from your HDTV and HD DVD. Blu-ray players start around $399 and since the movies aren’t on fire sales, the pricing on most of them ends up being a lot higher. It makes even more sense for existing HD DVD owners to get in on these sales than for someone new starting out with HD DVD. Regardless, these sales are appealing to people faced with tightening entertainment budgets in the months ahead.

• Engadget story
• dvd.co.uk sale (British site)
• EzDvd clearance sale on HD DVD (Australian site)
• Dvdcrave has lots of HD DVD titles under USD $9 (Australian site)

UPDATE: Roger mentioned in the comments that www.HMV.co.uk and zavvi.co.uk also have super deals like American Gangster for £4.99 (about US $10, but factor in shipping to the US to see if the deal is worth it).

There’s a saying that the leader in any race has a big target on his back. Any new leader to emerge inherits that target and, in some kinds of races, even the observers can take their shots.

This is certainly the case with Blu-ray right now where the last couple of weeks have seen two separate reports about temporary and/or prolonged gloom.

The first shot at the new leader was from research firm, ABI, who said that demand for Blu-ray players will be low until those players hit the $200 mark. This is common knowledge if you’ve been following the format war, and as an HD DVD owner, you may already fall into this customer profile. The prospect of starting over or transitioning to the other format is made less palatable when you consider how much more expensive it’s going to be to get the player in the first place. If Blu-ray players were far less expensive, then more of us in the HD DVD crowd would gone purple and sooner.

Getting back to the ABI report, they think it’s not going to be until sometime in 2009 that Blu-ray really picks up steam and wider adoption.

The more recent shot at Blu-ray comes from NPD research numbers and a story that’s picked up a lot of momentum all over the web, suggesting that Sony’s victory lap for winning the format war is a short one. Recent sales tracking data from the NPD group showed a significant drop in standalone Blu-ray player sales in the last few months, with a big 40% dip in February.

If the format war was still going strong, we’d expect Team Blu to come back and point to strong PS3 sales and say that overall adoption of machines with Blu-ray drives in them is still very healthy — and they’d be right. This would be followed by the HD DVD camp sticking to their guns about standalone player sales being a better indicator of high-def movie adoption, and they’d also be right. Team Blu would also come back (and they have) to point out that sales of all kinds of things are usually low following all the big shopping that happens at Christmas time.

Another explanation given for the weakness in Blu-ray player sales is that there’s a supply problem, and that the small numbers are actually a reflection of stores not having enough in stock, and not so much that people aren’t interested. This could be true. It’s the same explanation given for why Xbox 360 sales were a little soft in those last few months too.

And if I recall, there were also a lot of headlines in March about a general increase in the pricing on Blu-ray players. While the MSRP did not change, discounts and deals were rare. Either way, it wasn’t the sort of news that drives customers to stores.

Many HD DVD owners find a good reason to smirk at these recent developments because it’s a relief to finally hear some bad news that’s not about their own format. Instead of taking pot-shots at HD DVD, reporters and analysts now focus all of their scrutiny and nastiness on the new target bearer.

• Blu-ray: The Future Has Been Delayed at the New York Times