Toshiba rumored to quit HD DVD as Wal-Mart pulls support - Page 4

Given that the PS3 costed more than twice the Wii, and costsd 50% more than the already established XBox360, I'm skeptical of your suggestion that so many bought the PS3 not knowing any better. I think for the typical buyer, it takes deliberate effort to chose the most expensive platform when there were two cheaper platforms, three if you count PS2.

I don't think the comparison to Dell fits, as Dell has generally been offering the cheapest major brand of computer.

I see. That would seem to leave Toshiba even further out. I can't remember even a single thing they have done of importance.

I was comparing it to the same reason of why people buy PCs over Macs, they don't know any better. Most, 90%, have never even spent 3 seconds with a Mac.

Same with PS3, most people bought it because they thought "PS2 Successor" and because of all the hype surrounding it. Why do you think PS3 sales fell flat after launch? Because its expensive? No, they dropped the price, it didn't help. People realized that it didn't live up to its promise and looked elsewhere for satisfaction, some bought it because they liked it regardless, others bought it because they were clueless. Overall it definently did not fly off the shelves

PS3 was all hype when it launched, It launched DOA and sales fell flat, and it hasn't gotten any better since. Its still just all hype, nothing more.

There are clearly more Wiis for sale than PS3s. Common sense tells us that. My argument is that PS3 is not "a miserable failure."

As for gamers—note that I am not a gamer myself—the "hardcore gamers: I know use a PC for games and not a console. Most, if not all, of them also purchased the PS3 for playing Blu-ray movies. My personal observations aren't enough to represent the entire market, but it does show that at least some people are buying a PS3 for playing movies so it has had "a minimal effect on Bluray's adaptation by the public."

It's more like Blu-Ray will have a DELAYED effect, compared to what DVD did.

This is due to the format war being up in the air for so long, plus the fact that many ppl did not/still don't have HD TV sets yet.

Now that the format war is effectively over, and HD set ownership is zooming (analog TV broadcasts go away in a year), you can expect Blu-Ray to have an impact.

Of course, HD downloads will be competition going forward, so Blu-Ray will not have the market all to itself even with the demise of HD-DVD. Even so, I'd expect Blu-Ray to be a popular format and do well. The difference between it and DVD on a good-sized HDTV is pretty darn noticeable, even vs an upsampling DVD player.

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Dude, what the hell are you talking about?!? Go to Best Buy and count their stock of PS3s vs Wiis. Come back here and post.

What kind of delusional common sense are you using? Where have you been the past year, lala land?

(no offense, i often like you posts, lol)

While I don't have all the numbers at hand, I do have some:

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/29154/Japa...ii-in-November

What you're doing is trying to make things into what you want them to be. But, they aren't.

So show that 15 million bhind number, and let's see how it's evolving.

Just don't be so quick to call someone an idiot because they think something else than you do.

I also don't think that anyone here cares about how cheap you want to proclaim yourself to be. That's way too much information.

How can you believe there are more PS3s for sale and yet there are so many more Wiis being sold? Do you actually think there are more than 12M PS3s that are stagnating in the channels?

edit: Perhaps we are not on the same page. By "for sale" I am referring to units produced and shipped to stores. I am not excluding units that have already sold. For reasons previously mentioned and the chart you've supplied, the Wii is clearly selling more units and making more money as it's not loss leader like the PS3 and 360. Therefore, there are more WIi unit available for purchase than the PS3.

Blu-ray players have been out since 2003 and it still is nowhere to be found in the average consumers home. 5 years later, where are they?
are
The content speaks for itself. Try and go rent a Bluray movie at Blockbuster, I think until recently, they didn't even carry BD movies.

Speaking of movies, after 5+ years of being on the shelves, how many movies are available in BD?


493 titles after 5 years? Pathetic! Bluray doesn't even have the buzz surround it that DVD did. Consumer are confused and frankly don't care.

The content available speaks for itself. Nobody is making BD discs, because nobody owns BD players. Some people might buy a few more now, but it will take years, many years for it to be anything significant.

...and by the time it does, we will have moved onto the next latest and greatest thing, which will probably be iPods that can hold dozens of BD-quality movies or internet downloads to set top boxes (like AppleTV).

Of course it's not. Not unless consumers are somehow forced to buy a PS3 instead of some other game console (or none).

And they're not.

This is yet another nail in the HDDVD coffin, it has been obvious for a while that this war is over. There's a snowball effect, once one format is seen as having an advantage, consumers and corporate supporters start to pick (or switch) sides.

There's no way to stop momentum once it starts. Game over.


There will still be competition between manufacturers, there just won't be competition between formats. Prices will drop because sales will increase and economies of scale will kick in and they will be cheaper to make. Same thing happened with CD and DVD, even though there weren't competing formats, prices of players still dropped in a huge way.


You think this gen of console sales is over? Xbox sales have been flat, and now that bluray won the HD war, many more people will consider it since it also gets them a HD movie player. I thought sony totally botched things, but with bluray they have a shot at catching and passing xbox sales worldwide.

Let me tell you something about that lack of stock problem. Many people in the business have been writing that they can;'t understand why, after all this time, Nintendo can't keep production at a high enough level. The answer may be different than you think.

MS did this with the 360 when it first came out. When demand is higher than availability, it seems as though demand is still at a frenzy. But, Nintendo has had plenty of time to get its manufacturers to make up those deficits. But they haven't. A good theory is that it's intentional. If they increased production to the point that all buyers could be served, then we would see that frenzy die down, and people's perceptions would change. It would no longer be that the can't keep them in stock. Nintendo is doing "managed Expectations".

Obviously, as the price to manufacture a product drops, and R&D costs are paid off, prices fall. It was estimated that, initially, it cost $800 for Sony to manufacture a PS3. The estimate is nor $400. Sony announced a profit for its games division, so things are going well.

You're even making things up. Most people I know who bought a PS3 love it. It's true that games have taken longer to come out, both because of the lateness of the arrival of the machine, and its complexity, but that changed.

Why do you have such hatred?

Once the format war is over, Apple can finally start offering bluray disk players in computers.

I don't hate the PS3 at all
I wouldn't buy one, but I don't hate it.

Even if Nintendo is intentionally keeping shipments slow the demand is still shy high, as supplies fly off the shelves as soon as they come in. At least what Nintendo might be doing, if it is, is still better than stuffing the channels and having your units sit on the shelves collecting dust like M$ and Sony.

Oh, and if this "lack of stock" strategy works so well for Nintendo, why don't M$, Sony, and even Apple try it?

Demand for Wii is sky high, and much much higher than PS3, you can't deny that.

According to Wikipedia, the first Blu-ray Disc titles were released on June 20, 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray...s_developments

Then why would Blu-ray player be commercially available in 2003 with no content until 2006? makes no sense

That was a recorder that was only available in Japan. (that's clearly stated where you culled your bit of info from)


Here's a more relevant bit for the discussion at hand.
From Wikipedia:
"The first BD-ROM players were shipped in the middle of June 2006...The first Blu-ray Disc titles were released on June 20, 2006."

Well, you write as though you hate them. Perhaps you can avoid the pejoratives.

no one is denying the popularity of the Wii. But the reality of the PS3 is that it was very late, and difficult to program. You might remember that the PS2 was also accused of being difficult to program, and new games ran late.

The PS3 will never have the dominance the PS2 did, but it will do much better over time. I firmly believe that it will challenge the Wii in the long term.

Don't forget that new complex technologies have more room to drop in price than do more basic devices using more standard technologies.

For example, both the the Wii and 360 use standard DVD players, which cost them about $5 in the quantities they buy them in. The PS3 uses the BD player, which was estimated to cost Sony at least $300 in the beginning.

Which of those components do you think would drop in price more, over the lifetime of the product? In a year from now, the BD player will cost Sony $50, but the DVD players will still cost $5. A year later, assuming that both MS and Nintendo still use them, the DVD players will still cost $5, but the BD player will cost $15.

The same think is true of the chips. The Cell is a monster to design and produce, but the price is already dropping greatly. It's been expensive. Much more than the simple cpu for the Wii, and more than the fairly expensive chip for the 360.

We all know how chip prices fall, particularly when moving to a smaller process.

But the cheap and simple cpu for the Wii hasn't got much further to fall as it's already cheap.

I can easily see the PS3 dropping to $349 later this year, and to $299 by the end of the year, or early next year.

It will continue to drop.

With the price dropping faster than Nintendo can drop theirs, as they depend upon making high profits from every unit sold, the prices will begin to converge, even if the Wii is always a bit cheaper.

Once the prices are close, and cheaper, the extra capability of the PS3 will be seen as being much more valuable.

The Wii will be relegated to the teen market, as the Cube became.

Nintendo will have to release a more capable model.

The fact that the Wii only does 480p widescreen through a component cable, vs 1080p through HDMi as does both the PS3 and 360, will make a difference as more people continue to get Widescreen HD sets.

While my daughters Wii looks good on my set playing Pitman, other games don't look as good, but both the 360 and PS3 look far better.

Considering how much gamers seem to care about this, the Wii will be at a long term disadvantage from this alone.

Once the other systems catch up with their wireless controllers, as you know they will, the last advantage the Wii has will disappear.

This is what I extracted from that Wikipedia page last week:

The first DVR Blue prototypes were unveiled at the CEATEC exhibition in October 2000
February 2002, the project was officially announced as Blu-ray
The first consumer devices were in stores on April 10, 2003. This device was the Sony BDZ-S77; a BD-RE recorder that was only made available in Japan. The recommended price was US$3800. However, there was no standard for pre-recorded video (BD-ROM) and no movies were released for this player. The Blu-ray Disc standard was still years away
The Blu-ray Disc physical specifications were finished in 2004
The BD-ROM specifications were finalized in early 2006
The first BD-ROM players were shipped in the middle of June 2006, though HD DVD players beat them in the race to the market by a few months
The first Blu-ray Disc titles were released on June 20, 2006.
The first mass-market Blu-ray rewritable drive for the PC was the BWU-100A, released by Sony on July 18, 2006
The earliest releases used MPEG-2 video compression, the same method used on DVDs. The first releases using the newer VC-1 and AVC codecs were introduced in September 2006
The first movies using dual layer discs (50 GB) were introduced in October 2006

600 titles in 20 months is much faster than DVD, if I remember correctly. While confusing for consumers and it obviously deterred many from adopting until a clear winner was crowned, it did serve well to lower the the prices much faster when DVD first came on the scene.

Wow, you sure didn't read my post. Again, there are two reasons:

1) Format war- Now over.

2) Not many ppl have HDTVs. That's changing, particularly with analog TV broadcasts sunsetting in one year.


With its obstacles clearing, Blu-Ray will now ramp up in popularity. I think it'd be hard to find an industry expert or analyst who disagrees with that.

Edit- Oh, and your point is incorrect in any case, as Solip pointed out. Consumer Blu-ray players have only been out since '06. Ah well.


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Oh, and to gun down another point that was erroneously made, which was that the PS3 had "minimal impact" on Blu-Ray adoption... we have some quotes from a CNN article:


Sony's Blu-ray technology is emerging as the likely winner in the format battle for the next generation of DVD players after Toshiba appeared ready to ditch its HD DVD business.

Such a move would help consumers know which system to invest in and would likely boost sales in Blu-ray gadgets, analysts say. But it will disappoint the 1 million people around the world estimated by Toshiba who have already bought HD DVD players.


Okay, so 1 million HD DVD players were sold worldwide (and that figure does include the HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360). So how many PS3s are there?:


Adding to Blu-ray's momentum was the gradual increase in sales of Sony's PlayStation 3 home video-game console, which also works as a Blu-ray player. Sony has sold 10.5 million PS3 machines worldwide since the machine went on sale late 2006.


Wow... so there are 10 TIMES more PS3s out there, all Blu-Ray capable, than HD DVD's entire worldwide installed base? Sounds like that was a factor.

To be fair, the same article does go on to say:


But PS3 sales have trailed the blockbuster Wii machine from Nintendo, and the game machine wasn't widely seen as that critical to the video format battle.


... though how they draw that conclusion given the PS3 installed base is so much larger than the entire HD-DVD installed base, is beyond me. Also, the Wii had little to do with the format war, except to take sales away from both the PS3 (Blu-Ray) and Xbox360 (HD-DVD, via add-on).

In any case, it's just common sense that having 10 million more Blu-Ray machines out there did indeed help.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/BUSINESS/02/....ap/index.html

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If just one out of five PS3 owners bought a couple of movies a year, then those number add up.

In an unrelated side note, I've officially GIVEN UP on Safari... it just will NOT let go of memory, and sooner or later I'm hitting the disk and everything gets very slooooooooow. Even quitting or resetting Safari doesn't seem to help much.

And I still, even with 3.0.4, get the occasional crash on top of everything else.

Now running Firefox 3 Beta 3, with no regrets. Sorry Stevie, I gave it every chance... you just didn't deliver.


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10 million isn't necessarily the "real" number, but it's quite the sleeping dragon as people buy HD sets and awareness rises. As it was, a survey a few months ago showed that only about half of the owners knew it could do high-def anything. I think about a quarter of them were actively used as Blu-Ray players. 2.5 million machines vs. 1 million is quite a difference and I think that played out in the VideoScan figures.

Why was mdotdubz banned? I didn't read anything from him that would warrant a banning.

Yup. Not to mention that PS3s were not the only Blu-Ray machines out there.


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Have you tried WebKit nightly builds?

When did that happen? I didn't see it.

Too many "idiot" and "loser" comments.

Under his name in every post he's made is the word "banned" in red.

Perhaps it was relating to a different thread, as I don't think a single use of "idiot" would warrant such an action by these admins here.

Ok, now that I scrolled back I see. I don't know what he might have done elsewhere.

We all go overboard upon occasion, but I suppose it's the constancy that matters. Certainly, i've been called some pretty bad things by a few, but no one interceded. I sometimes respond "actively" if I feel as though I'm being insulted, or that someone is posting in a non responsive manner. But, usually, I let it go.

I freely admit that I've been enjoying the insults more often and, perhaps, have been answering some people on this forum in an attempt to get them riled up while still not breaking the forum rules. I blame the Writers Guild strike: Conflict is drama; drama is entertainment.

See this thread. Got banned at post #15.

I'll give it a shot, so long as its web page compatibility is good.

I'm just so very disappointed/disgusted with Safari at this point.


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Thanks.

Gotcha. Thanks.

I hope the ban isn't a long one. His name calling, while uncalled for, does not scream to me that he was trying to incite or inflame the board. It just seemed he was writing in the same manner he would talk to his friends.

I was having some problem with the earlier betas, but it mostly worked well until 10.5. Then, when I updated the Flash to the beta, it kept crashing when certain Flash ads were on the page. I would shrink the page so they didn't appear, and all was well. Then there was some other problem, but I don't remember what. When Adobe again updated the flash plug-in, my problems from that went away. At some point, an Apple update stopped the other crashing, and Safari has been very stable.

I don't check the memory usage.

Friends talk that way to each other on Tv comedies, but if someone was consistent doing that in real like, there wouldn't be any friends.

I think it's fair to say most of us get a little hot under the collar at times in this forum and may resort to a quick insult. I think he used them a little too often, but like you, I don't think it was awful enough to deserve banning. Maybe if he was slinging around terms like a-hole.


Hmm. That's odd. I notice Safari eats a lot of RAM after a while, too. But whenever I quit, it all comes back. Especially with Safari 3 and its ability to "Reopen all windows from last session," I don't mind just quitting and restarting. That, BTW, is not a feature even Firefox has, unless they've added it in V3. (I'm talking about reopening after quitting. Firefox 2 can recover after a crash or after a force quit, but not a regular quit.)


Indeed. In fact, towards the end of last year, standalone Blu-ray players were outselling HD DVD players.

Well as far as M$ being in the HD-DVD camp, I'm pleased that they've lost! I mean...Blu-Ray is a sexier name anyway...who came up with HD-DVD anyway...gold medal for creativity there, sounds like something from the nerd patrol at MicroShite.

Oh, BTW, to anyone who says "downloads are the future," see this article at Macworld. You may or may not get really fat pipes in the future, but it won't be all the data you want anymore. So is it really worth paying for a download from the iTunes store or wherever, paying for the bandwidth and paying for the disk space to store it on or the blank to burn it to rather than just ordering the movie on Blu-ray?