Industry


Ads by TechWords

See your link here


Best Buy's Blu-ray bailout

This must be the season for bailouts. The U.S. rescues Bear Stearns and now Best Buy is going to bailout HD DVD owners. Big mistake.

Blu-ray disc players are overpriced and consumers are going to pay a format war tax on these devices for sometime. Rebates to HD DVD owners will help prolong the high prices on these players.

But I can understand why Best Buy wants to stay on the good side of its HD DVD owners with its $50 rebate.

HD DVD buyers were early adopters. They are coveted consumers and the last people that retail stores want to upset.

Early adopters pay premium and take risks and I’ll bet that their basements, closets and desk draws are stuffed full of discarded electronics and near-dead formats, like my two Minidisc players.

A true early adopter has recovered from the format war and owns a Blu-Ray player, or is at least thinking of buying one. A true early adopter just shrugs his/her shoulders and moves on.

Millions of dollars were spent by this industry to try to convince manufacturers, film and DVD producers and distributors, retailers and not to mention consumers, to adopt one format over the other. Those cost will be recovered.

I am not going to pay the format war tax and spend $400 plus on a DVD player, Blu-ray or otherwise. Until the Blu-ray players decline in price by at least half, I won’t even consider one. The format war has been a wasteful exercise and rebates just keep that waste going.

Best Buy should take the money in its early adopter $10 million gift card bailout fund and use it to cut Blu-ray prices. The only thing this bailout helps is the high price of Blu-ray systems.

What People Are Saying

:Free Bluray DVD ripper and more bonus offered to affiliate

I am a new vendor in http://www.clickbank.com. I have launched a software program namely 'Bluray DVD Ripper'. It lets you:

• Make backup digital copies of your precious Blu Ray and DVD movies.
• Convert Blu Ray and DVD movies to digital formats that can play on your favorite portable media player.
• Rip your favorite scenes from your DVD and Blu Ray movies.
• Compress movies to fit more of them on your hard disk or portable player.

As Blu-ray Discs become more and more popular, Bluray Ripper is in urgent need among most of the Bluray discs users. It has a market with the greatest potential and the widest target consumers in the world!

For the affiliates in clickbank, hurry up to seize the initiative of your own and earn 50% commission. I'm sure it will bring good sale for you! . Come on, and get your wonderful digital life started!

PS: As I am a new member here, there are no live links and signatures available to me. So please keywords search 'Blu-ray Ripper' in the Marketplace at ClickBank to find it

HD DVD vs Blu-ray

I'm disgusted with the Toshiba, Best Buy, Circuit City and the whole lot of them who promoted so heavily HD DVD. We weren't marketed to as "early adopters" rather come home to Best Buy and you can't go wrong. Someone please show me a class action I can sign on to.

Free Bluray DVD ripper and more bonus offered to affiliate

I am a new vendor in http://www.clickbank.com. I have launched a software program namely 'Bluray DVD Ripper'. It lets you:

• Make backup digital copies of your precious Blu Ray and DVD movies.
• Convert Blu Ray and DVD movies to digital formats that can play on your favorite portable media player.
• Rip your favorite scenes from your DVD and Blu Ray movies.
• Compress movies to fit more of them on your hard disk or portable player.

As Blu-ray Discs become more and more popular, Bluray Ripper is in urgent need among most of the Bluray discs users. It has a market with the greatest potential and the widest target consumers in the world!

For the affiliates in clickbank, hurry up to seize the initiative of your own and earn 50% commission. I'm sure it will bring good sale for you! . Come on, and get your wonderful digital life started!

PS: As I am a new member here, there are no live links and signatures available to me. So please keywords search 'Blu-ray Ripper' in the Marketplace at ClickBank to find it

Free Bluray DVD ripper and more bonus offered to affiliate

I am a new vendor in http://www.clickbank.com. I have launched a software program namely 'Bluray DVD Ripper'. It lets you:

• Make backup digital copies of your precious Blu Ray and DVD movies.
• Convert Blu Ray and DVD movies to digital formats that can play on your favorite portable media player.
• Rip your favorite scenes from your DVD and Blu Ray movies.
• Compress movies to fit more of them on your hard disk or portable player.

As Blu-ray Discs become more and more popular, Bluray Ripper is in urgent need among most of the Bluray discs users. It has a market with the greatest potential and the widest target consumers in the world!

For the affiliates in clickbank, hurry up to seize the initiative of your own and earn 50% commission. I'm sure it will bring good sale for you! . Come on, and get your wonderful digital life started!

PS: As I am a new member here, there are no live links and signatures available to me. So please keywords search 'Blu-ray Ripper' in the Marketplace at ClickBank to find it

My Bue-ray player will cost less than $200

I fully agree with Mr. Thibodeau. I will not purchase a Blue-ray player for more than $200. Anyone buying one now is simply giving money away without receiving adequate value.

Sony is on the verge of alienating a huge early adopter community with it Blue-ray price gouging. By the time they figure this it, we may all be downloading our movies in HD from NetFlix. Sony Blue-ray may become another Betamax, not because they lost a battle with another format, but because they won and didn't know what to do if they won. (Sounds almost like what happened to the U.S. in Iraq.)

Will Sony beat Netflix to the market to deliver HD content to me. The way things look at thim moment, I think not.

Max

Another download weenie?

"Will Sony beat Netflix to the market to deliver HD content to me. The way things look at thim moment, I think not."

Do you even know what "bandwidth" means?

It is not going to happen for years, believe me.

In the meantime, some online services will take a HD movie, down sample it to 720, compress the bejesus out of it, and simply call it HD. And then download weenies like you (and computerworld) will happily claim that they are "downloading" their HD media. Sure, it will happen one day, but not for several hundred days (read: years). In the meantime, feel free to continue the sour grapes attitude while everyone passes you by.

Are You Nuts?

Playstation 3: 80 gig hard drive (its a computer),6 usb ports, It's wireless. It's uploadable and downloadable. Cruise the net from your TV. 1080p Blu-ray built in player. Player upsteps normal DVD's to 720 or better.

All this for less than 500 bucks. Try to find an 80 gig computer, wireless capable with high def player for this price.

Can we just say "sour grapes"?

Another idiotic "computer world" commentary

What is up with you guys? Yet another "blu-ray sucks and I want my downloads" absurdity? We would all love our HD downloads, but there simply is not enough bandwidth for everybody right now! Or perhaps you don't mind your media compressed, low resolution (and yes, 720 IS low resolution, despite what the marketers say) and nice low-fi audio tracks (yes, just like what you have been getting on your iPod for years and years after *that* "overtook" CD).

Best Buy is doing the right thing, to give people the opportunity to make something back from their misstep. If they bought a HD-DVD player, that means that they want their HD, and not their downloads. Then of course, there are those (such as yourselves, presumably) who are still "sore" that they backed the wrong horse, and are still writing these dumb "revenge" commentaries.

Not quite

Thank you for your response, but to be clear I didn't back any horse. I had no plans to buy a high-def player until the format war was decided. It didn't matter to me who won.

If the industry had avoided the format war, high-def DVD players would be in wide use today and at a price point well below $400, which is what Best Buy is charging for its Blu-ray.

The industry spent a lot of money to decide a winner and it will now try to get that money back from consumers through continued high prices on DVDs and Blu-ray players. The rebate to HD-DVD buyers just increases the cost of the format war and prolongs the high pricing on Blu-ray systems.

I think you missed the point

First off, I would like to note that you are completely right that the true early adopter has gotten over their loss and bought, or are currently looking for, a bluray player. That being said, this is not the person Best Buy is targeting.
Best Buy's target here (in my opinion) is for those that bought HD-DVD wholeheartedly believing that they were going to win, were misled, or misunderstood in any way, and are put out by the loss of a war they may not have really understood.
Instead of losing that install base, possibly forever, Best Buy is taking an active approach to instilling trust in their consumers by helping them get back into the HD market they were tossed out of with HD-DVD's defeat.
These gift cards are not sympathy gifts to those who bet wrong, but a plea for those who are now wary of the HD player market to buy a Bluray player. That way, they will buy Blu-ray movies from Best Buy in the future.
Also, I would like to note that the card is for $50. The plan here is to recuperate their losses first, by reusing parts (I'm sure there are usable parts in HD-DVD players), and from then on, even if they still have 'given' the consumer $40, thats only two new releases on bluray, and by instilling confidence in their brand, consumers are going to go to Best Buy first when they look for a new movie.