Talk about lower pricing on HD DVD players had already been surfacing at internet forums, and late Sunday night, Toshiba formally announced new prices on the third-generation of players:
- HD-A3 at $149.99
- HD-A30 at $199.99
- HD-A35 at $299.99
According to the press release, the new pricing will be accompanied by major initiatives including joint advertising campaigns with studios. They’ll also start highlighting the benefits of HD DVD along with the benefits that HD DVD players bring to consumers’ current DVD libraries via upconversion of standard DVDs to provide near-high definition picture quality. Though it’s not mentioned specifically, I’m sure the free movie offer is likely to be extended for some more months too, but let’s see.
Jodi Sally, VP of Marketing for Toshiba’s Digital A/V Group is quoted as saying:
Our HD DVD players not only play back approximately 800 HD DVD titles available worldwide and deliver an entirely new level of entertainment but also enhance the picture quality to near high definition on legacy DVD titles by all studios. In short, we added high def to DVD which already is the de facto standard format created and approved by the DVD Forum that consists of more than two hundred companies.
The press release touts low prices as crucial for mainstream adoption, with Yoshi Uchiyama, Group Vice President Digital A/V Group saying:
Consumer sales this holiday season have proven that the consumer awareness of the HD DVD format has been elevated and pricing is the most critical determinant in consumers’ purchase decision of the next generation HD DVD technology. The value HD DVD provides to the consumer simply cannot be ignored.
These prices are already being discounted at Amazon and elsewhere, and appear to have gone into effect as early as last Friday. Some will describe it as a fire sale, but it’s definitely the logical step for HD DVD in the format war. In fact, it’s probable that these price reductions were planned all along for the post-holiday season.
These actions will certainly get more players out into the wild, and further increase awareness of the format and its various features. I hope that they’ve got some really good commercials and print ads lined up to go along with all of this.
I’m sure many people will have strong reactions to the news that HD DVD is still fighting in the format war. Some will be cheering while others are jeering. What I really want to learn more about is the much bigger strategy from all of these supporting companies. A crystal ball would come in really handy right about now…
January 13th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
The standard notice about comment moderation still holds. This is a site for HD DVD so don’t be surprised if your anti-HD DVD comments aren’t getting published.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:09 am
Great news, I couldn’t be more happy. HD DVD is the true consumers format, the best there is. With Universal, DreamWorks SKG and Paramount firmly backing HD DVD, the war is still strong. Kudos to Toshiba!
January 14th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Toshiba has stopped fighting a format war and is now actively damaging the future of the HDM market.
Stop selling a format with a slim chance of victory to unknowing consumers. Throw in the towel, please. It’s over, move on!
January 14th, 2008 at 3:17 am
Don’t give up!! Stay together and be strong!
Why don’t you buy the Movie-Part of Warner together with Universal and Paramount? Warner is not so worthy anymore, but have great moviestock that would be nice on HD-DVD in the future.
Sorry if my english was to bad, hope you can understand what I mean.
January 14th, 2008 at 4:12 am
common toshiba, make the hard move and lets come combo discs with dvd and hd dvd versions on moderate prices
January 14th, 2008 at 5:56 am
I’m glad Toshiba is still fighting! If you read the 3:10 to Yuma review on the Blu-Ray discL it turns out they force you to watch 14 mins of trailers in the begining, do we really want that? DVD & HD-DVD FTW!
January 14th, 2008 at 7:05 am
@Fischer - I think you meant to express that they should buy the movie rights, and not the company. I think they already tried incentives to WB but were surprised at the last minute with that route.
@Lucian - Toshiba has always been first to lower prices on hardware, but it’s not really up to them to control all movie pricing. The studios themselves have to pitch in for that. We only started having HD DVD “buy 1 get 1 free” kinds of sales around last December, and there need to be more of those.
January 14th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Don’t let Sony & the Blu-Ray group fool you that this format war is over. Sony cannot buy themselves a win. This war has just begun, and the last thing consumes need is a problematic profile plagued Blu-Ray format waiting for a massive consumer class-action law suit due to complete incompatabilities with newer movies & such.
Blu-Ray is simply anti-consumer period. No if’s or buts about it SOLID STATE FACTS.
All past and present profile 1.0 Blu-Ray players are a complete waste of money. Just complete junk to say the least. Only the PS3 is upgradable to play future movie titles based on profile 2.0. HD DVD from day 1 has been a complete spec and offers a lot more than Blu-Ray will ever offer. And HD DVD is completely compatable with anything that posseses the HD DVD LOGO on it.
I commend Toshiba for listening to consumers and offering affordable HD DVD players which is the only Hi Def format that has any chance in surpassing SD DVD. Without HD DVD, HDM is a dead duck period.
Now HD DVD player prices are truly at a price for accelerated mass adoption. This is where the advertisements & incentive can really work well.
Just look at the A3, A30 & A35, they are all in the top 100 of the electronics section for amazon.com. This is really good news. As long as they can have HD DVD piggy back off DVD something really good is going to happen. I hope these price cuts also reflect Canada too.
Expect more massive price cuts on both HD DVD players and HD DVD movies in the coming months.
January 14th, 2008 at 8:37 am
No, i meant the company, not only the rights of the movies. Warner is in not good conditions and the complete Company goes down. Best time to take a part of the pie
January 14th, 2008 at 9:01 am
They don’t force you to go through 14 minutes of trailers. You can bypass them with one button press. I know cause I just watched it last night. I have and love both formats. Theyeach have their own strengths and weaknesses. On that note, Amazon is offering all these players even cheaper. the A-3 is $130 and the the A-30 is $160. Even if HD-DVD doesn’t survive this is still a great deal!
January 14th, 2008 at 9:27 am
@Fischer - Sony has been involved with consumer electronics and formats for a very long time, and they actually do own movie and music studios so it’s not an outlandish proposal. But even Sony achieved that position of content ownership slowly. WB is a major part of Time Warner, and I’m sure Time Warner values the studio highly.
January 14th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Excellent, but it still doesn’t detract from the fact that Warner has left, and the majority of my favorite movies are made by them. I probably will end up getting an HD-A30 because I got a new 1080p TV, but my confidence in the format has shakened. At the very least, I can use it as an upconverting player until reasonably priced (sub-$250) Blu-Ray profile 2.0 player comes out.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Awesome news. Upconverting is the way to go and emphasizing this feature will get J6P to buy a player sooner. I’ve been using my HD-A2 almost exclusively for upconverting my DVDs and I can hardly see the difference with the couple of HD-DVDs I have. And we have all the studios on DVD :-).
January 14th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Great move of Toshiba. Now MS needs to lower the Xbox add-on price. With all those movies it’s a good deal even if blu-r wins. I think Warner stepped out to soon. Hurting the real early adopters which are the real movie fans. That’s never good for consumers.
January 14th, 2008 at 10:32 am
This is why I believe HD DVD will win in the long run. Blu ray is only doing well right now because of the PS3. PS3 owners would have never bought a Blu ray player, but since they have one now they are buying movies. HD DVD standalones are stomping blu ray into the ground. Eventually HD DVD movie sales will catch up and probably surpass blu ray. Studios like Fox and Disney wont be able to ignore the large amount of players in consumers homes because HD DVD players are so affordable.
Plus they arent running into the problems that blu ray players are. It wasnt just blu ray early adopters that were screwed. When 2.0 comes out no corrent blu ray players (except for the PS3) will be able to play them.
January 14th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Just bought a A3 and Batman Begins through Amazon. I really think WB leaving was a good thing. Players are now a lot cheaper allowing individuals like myself without unlimited resources to enter the market with little risk. Plus, I get to watch my current library of DVDs upscaled to 720p or 1080i. My guess is before you know it HD-DVD will be neck and neck with Blu and WB will come back. Until then, I will keep renting HD-DVDs through Netflix and buying the movies I love in HD-DVD.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
There sure is a lot of optimism amongst HD DVD supporters, but we’ll have to see how the marketplace of real consumers actually reacts.
I’m sure many will go for the “it upscales your current DVD collection and adds HD discs too” argument, but movies better get cheap too. I wouldn’t count on Blu studios switching or going neutral (unless they got paid for it) simply because of sales in one quarter. Player growth needs to be sustained, and the installed user base needs to get big enough that, as with the PS3, all it takes is for people to buy just a couple of discs a month to make their presence known.
January 14th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Why is the BluRay consortium and it’s ilk acting so surprized by HD-DVD’s new price MSRP?
Even more surprizing is the reaction of “true Blue” loyalists. A hardware price war is exactly what’s needed. BR needs to be forced to get profile 2.0 players to market and competitively priced asap. I know the plan was likely to hope that HD-DVD would throw in the towel after Warner’s defection and then offload the remaing stocks of profile 1.0 players on an unsuspecting consumer for a tidy profit and then throw out a quick set of profile 1.1 players that are priced +$100 each touting the new PiP feature, and THEN to introduce the “Final Profile 2.0″ players which would finally standardize the BluRay spec and with no more competition, the prices on the new 2.0 players would likely hover $500 for a base model. BUT NOT SO FAST! HD-DVD is far from dead and is selling their “FINALIZED SPEC” hardware at affordable prices for ALL consumers to be able to take advantage of. Seems to me all Toshiba and it’s partners have to do is launch one helluva marketing campaign and then the REAL fun will start.
January 14th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I do not think that HD DVD supporters are getting too optimistic just yet. I think that a major reality was given to us all with the Warner switch to Blu-Ray. However, Toshiba has apparently not yet played all of the cards in their hand. So they need a seriously kick ass and relentless marketing campaign that shows the differentiation between HD DVD, Blu-Ray (not to be mentioned by name) and DVD.
Yes the price points now give the retailers the argument about up-converting DVD versus HD DVD. Hell why not get an A3? It up-converts just fine, oh and it does these other things when you are ready one day to use them. Toshiba should kill all DVD SA player production and only release HD DVD players as “Up-converting for the HiDef future,” DVD players!
The HD PG should be working on getting Universal and Paramount, for as long as they stay exclusive, to release some newer movie titles in Combo or TWIN format on HD DVD, with no equivalent SD DVD SKU at a reasonable price point, to both test the waters and to drive the Nielsen disc sales numbers crazy!
Toshiba it is do or die and we are in the 4th quarter with less than 5 min. to go and we are down 75% to 25%! This is for all of the Marbles $$$$$
January 14th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
These new prices and the re-marketing of the range as “SD DVD upscalers that also play HD DVD” looks very much like a damage-limiting exit strategy to me. Tosh are simply trying to sell off as much of their remaining HD DVD player stock as they can rather than writing it off (these prices even undercut some of their SD DVD upscalers!).
Bargain basement prices didn’t work out so well for them before Christmas (when Blu-ray disc sales were still higher) - so why should it work now when there is even less studio support for the format?
Still - it’s obviously a good time to pick up an HD DVD player if you are adamant to have one - and they are decent SD upscalers too (though of course plenty of Blu-ray players are too - the PS3 included). With any luck it might bring down the price of some of the standalone Blu-ray hardware too, but I don’t for one moment imagine that this is an actual effort by Toshiba to actively prolong the war; looks more like a calculated withdrawal to me.
January 14th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
I read an analyst’s comment somewhere that this is just Toshiba’s way of getting an eventual payout from Sony to go away. I don’t know. What I feel fairly certain of, however, is that big studio support of HD DVD is never going to return. It would be counterproductive for them to switch back and forth. I prefer HD DVD, and all the logical arguments favor it. But studios went with the more expensive disc.
But there is potentially a future for HD DVD. How about HD DVD burners, both for computers and for recording TV? If HD DVD really is cheaper to manufacture then the media should be cheaper than Blu-Ray media and our home movies and data might be burned to HD DVD instead. I’ve burned home-made HD DVD content to regular DVDs (using Ulead DVD MovieFactory) and played it back on my HD-A2 (WOW!), and I’d jump at the chance to do that on affordable 15GB+ media.
January 14th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
That analyst article is at http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205604607
January 14th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
I think there is reason to believe that studios will switch to HD DVD soon. HD DVD players continue to get affordable and consumers are adopting them. Eventually it will get to the point where there are too many HD DVD players in homes to ignore.
January 15th, 2008 at 10:28 am
There is some real denial on this board. No one can see the future, but some things on here being predicted is far from likely. Hope for stalemate, because thats all you got left.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
I’m glad they didn’t just keel over and die and leave all us early adopters hanging.
January 16th, 2008 at 6:31 am
Hi. I am a recent HD-DVD adopter (Christmas in fact) and was somewhat dismayed originally to read of the Warner move. But hey, I’ve got HD-DVD at a great price, a great selection of movies at reasonable prices. I’m not too worried. In fact given the confusion in the Blu-ray camp over their 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 profiles I’d have been just as worried if I’d bought one of them. My thought (and I’m wondering what you all think) is this… does it really matter? With the increase in movie download sites (I mean the legit ones) including HD, will any media format really “win” or will it all become downloads, like the music industry is becoming? Maybe in 2-3 years time it won’t matter whether you use HD-DVD or Blu-ray as you’ll be downloading movies on demand in full HD. So maybe the winner will be the one that can offer the better (i.e. cheaper!) PC rewritable media solution, and pre-recorded DVDs, whatever format, will become a thing of the past.
January 16th, 2008 at 8:00 am
AppleTV will have competition from Microsoft’s already announced 360 movie downloading, and Sony will join the fray with the same stuff on the PS3 later. Netflix already opened up their all-you-can-eat movie downloads and announced a box with LG, and I’m sure Blockbuster isn’t going to sit this out. We also heard about HDTVs at CES this year that directly connected themselves to the internet. On top of all this, the cable and satellite providers are already working on adding more capacity.
In the end, consumers will have a lot of choices for HD movie rentals. But HD ownership is still going to come from discs for many more years.
January 16th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Amen.
January 17th, 2008 at 10:53 am
HD dvd is going to survive!!!!! thanks to a great reduction in pricing, i just bought 3 entry level hda3’s for all my high def tv’s.. hell , i still have my whole collection of betamax!!!!!thanks SONY!!!!!!!!both formats can and will survive if the studios will just release all titles… thanks bill
January 17th, 2008 at 11:45 am
As rwarner174 said, there is some real denail going on in this forum. It’s time for Paramount and Universal accept reality and stop huring everyone. As Steve Jobs said, Blu-ray won.
Just accept facts and get on with it.
January 17th, 2008 at 11:56 am
All without Steve putting a single Blu-ray drive in a Mac. Boy, that man is smart!
January 17th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
It’s not smart, it’s stupid
He also said that he/they was better with their download service was better (than either formats) and yet, as far as I know, he’s just offering 720p resolution.
Yet, the confusion should end and all facts speak for Blu-ray, like it or not. I for one hope that Universal and Paramount accepts reality soon because the reality is that Blu-rau outsells HD-DVD on every single market and has the support of 70+ percent of the studios.
Last time the market went wih the cheap low quaity solution (VHS), this time the choice seems to be wiser :-). It’s just a matter of the remaining players in the wrong camp to accept this.
January 17th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Adding a Blu-ray or HD DVD drive to any computer makes that machine around $200 more expensive, and it’s smart to be a little cautious about exactly what you’re going to include in a product.
We expect Apple’s products to innovate in a way that’s less obvious than simply adding an expensive optical drive. In fact, their hot new laptop has no optical drive in it at all (not that one would fit), and AppleTV doesn’t either.
It remains to be seen whether 720p rentals are going to be more popular than 1080p disc ownership.
January 17th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Here’s a great article about HD DVD from tomshardware.com (a very respected pc hardware website).
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/01/17/don_t_say_goodbye_to_hd_dvd_yet/
January 17th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I learned a ton from “Tom” back when I first got involved with building my own PCs. That article at Tom’s is an optimistic piece, and my only caution is to say that comparing this to Nintendo’s Wii does not work so well because the Wii is a totally different format than the one they made just before it.