KMart Goes HD DVD Exclusive
by Pravin on October 31st, 2007 in news.
According to Home Media Magazine, Kmart is only going to be carrying HD DVD players. Kmart and Sears are related, and it looks like Sears stores will not feature this HD DVD exclusivity.
Kmart still carries the PS3 (a Blu-ray player), which makes this move roughly equivalent to Target’s Blu-ray move (Target still sells the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on player in stores, and HD DVD online).
The $200 price tag on the HD-A2, and increased availability at mass-retailers such as Kmart and Walmart are likely to have a major impact on the installed base of HD DVD users. Instead of early adopters, these retailers aim squarely at the more ordinary households (that most of us belong to or can relate to) which is where the real success lies. The holiday shopping season is only now getting started, and we’ll find out in another few months exactly how all of this turns out.
UPDATE: A Kmart exec clarified the announcement to say that they’re not excluding Blu-ray, however they feel that their customers are more likely to purchase HD DVD, thus their shelves aren’t featuring Blu-ray players. It should be noted that unlike the Target move with Blu-ray players, this one at Kmart did not involve Toshiba purchasing retail shelf space for themselves.
October 31st, 2007 at 11:51 am
I’d rather have Target than KMart.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:03 pm
I think it is obvious that stand alone HD DVD players are becoming the choice for consumers. I was just looking at Amazon and four of the top 25 best selling DVD players are HD DVD. In fact HD DVD holds the top two spots over all (HD-A2 and HD-A35) . In contrast only the Samsung Bd-P1400 Blueray player makes the top 25. with the holiday’s coming and many people shopping Amazon the real impact will be felt, not in discs but in Players. Dominate the players and discs take care of themselves.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I have heard people talk down about Kmart and Walmart customers, and I have to say that it’s in poor taste to do that. What does one gain by this kind of talk?
October 31st, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Actually they gain nothing and also demonstrate a lack of understanding of retail in general. Stores like KMart, Walmart, Target etc. are absolute cash cows. Chains like that drive retail and have an impact on prices in stores that are not thought of as places for “poor people”. Many consumer electronics stores have price matching policies and so when a KMart carries an item at a lower price it has a direct impact in the Circuit City down the street. Also it is a complete fallacy that only lower income families shop those stores. My household income is well into upper middle class but why spent $350 on an item that I can get for $300? Also the Walmarts have taken the place of the old department stores like A&S and Woolworths where you could get everything you needed for your family under one roof. Also bear in mind that to Toshiba and Sony money is money no matter where the customer spends it. If they sell more units in those stores those are the chains that the manufacturers will cut bulk buy deals to, further driving prices down.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:46 pm
VERY Interesting. This from PC World
As the holiday shopping season approaches, Toshiba is turning up the heat on the Blu-ray Disc camp with the launch of an HD DVD recorder that can record high-definition video to regular DVDs.
The Vardia RD-A301 will hit Japan in mid-December and can also transcode high-definition MPEG2 broadcasts on the fly to the more efficient MPEG4 compression format. MPEG4 video takes up less space, so more can be stored on an HD DVD disc or on the unit’s built-in 300G-byte hard-disk drive.
The increase in recording capacity through the transcoding is impressive: hard disk capacity jumps from 39 hours to 159 hours for terrestrial digital TV (Japanese ISDB-T standard at 17M bps).
Recording high-def video to commodity DVD discs is possible thanks to HD Rec, a recently standardized format from the DVD Forum. HD Rec allows up to 2 hours of transcoded high-def video to be stored on a 4.7G-byte DVD-R disc.
Blank HD DVD discs are still expensive, so the ability to use DVD discs could mean big cost savings for consumers who have a lot of content that they want to put on optical disc.
However, playback of the DVD discs is limited to the RD-A301 at present. There are no other machines — HD DVD or DVD — that are currently compatible with HD Rec. That’s likely to change over time, but quite how fast is unclear. Supporters of the rival Blu-ray Disc format have their own system, called AVC Rec which is, of course, incompatible with HD Rec.
Other features of the machine include the ability to record two video streams at once through the recorder’s dual tuners.
Toshiba estimates that the RD-A301 will go on sale for under ¥100,000 (US$875). It will be available in Japan only.
To coincide with its launch, Toshiba will offer consumers who buy the RD-A301 a copy of the hit movie “Transformers,” five blank HD DVD-R and DVD-R discs, and a “Transformers” action figure.
Paramount Pictures, the studio behind “Transformers,” claimed HD DVD sales of 190,000 copies of the movie in its first week on sale. That makes it the fastest-selling movie yet released on either of the high-definition formats, according to the company.
October 31st, 2007 at 12:53 pm
I was going to write about that burner, but was waiting to get more pictures to go with the story.
The importance of this device is that it burns HD to standard DVD-R discs, under what’s known as HD Rec. Sure, you can burn HD files you’ve encoded on your own, but you’ll only read those back on another computer.
Standard DVD-R discs are a lot cheaper than either HD DVD or Blu-ray recordable discs, and that’s part of the appeal of this approach.
October 31st, 2007 at 1:17 pm
This all goes back to my feeling that you really have to win this “war” at the hardware level. You can have all the exclusivedmovie deals in the world but without a large installed hardware base it does not mean anything. Pushing with a content first plan of attack is like the cart pulling the horse. Toshiba has a less “sexy” plan by pushing the hardware first but it is the way to win over the long haul. This is beginning to look more and more like Beta Vs. VHS.
October 31st, 2007 at 10:57 pm
$98 HD-A2 at Wal-Mart
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/01/toshiba-hd-a2-hd-dvd-player-100-this-friday-wal-mart/
November 2nd, 2007 at 6:41 am
This has been proven false.
November 2nd, 2007 at 6:49 am
It is false in the same way that Target is Blu-ray exclusive. Kmart sells the PS3 and will also sell Blu-ray discs in their stores. Target sells the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive, and is the only retailer offering the Venturer HD DVD player (online), and continues to sell HD DVD movies in their stores.
Both companies have had their excutives come out and dispel stories that either store has gone exclusive to one format.
November 3rd, 2007 at 7:49 am
The last time I was in my local Kmart, I saw a decent selection of Blue Ray discs alongside the standard DVD’s and very few HD DVD’s.
November 4th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Well we can preface by saying that anywhere you go there are relatively few HD discs of either formats. One thing to keep in mind is the fact that High Def is a gnat on the ovll elephant of SD DVD. Having said that I see recently a more even display of HD DVD and Bluer Ray in most stores.