DVDFile

Hardware and sales

HD DVD

Toshiba may have decided to delay the introduction of its second-generation HD DVD players delayed worldwide.  A Toshiba dealer’s post on the AVS Forum revealed the delay and claims that the problem is associated with a third party chip.  The less expensive of the two players, the HD-A2, is now scheduled to be released during the second week of December.  The more expensive, thousand dollar, HDMI 1.3-equipped, HD-XA2 is now scheduled for introduction during the last week of the year.  Perhaps this will also provide an opportunity for Toshiba to get it right the first time, avoiding the criticism of releasing a product too soon, and avoiding the expense of issuing one firmware fix after another. 

Despite the growing pains, the limited player manufacturing support, and the ever-present counter-motivating format war, HD DVD seem to be doing moderately well.  Over one and a half million HD DVDs have been shipped by the supporting studios since the April ’06 launch.  The HD DVD Promotion group claims that the HD DVD format is selling well enough to meet expectations.  As of this writing, there are a tad over one hundred titles available (which may grow as much as fifty percent by year’s end), suggesting that the average sales per title is running about fifteen thousand units (clearly, some titles are more popular than others; that’s simply an average).  Considering that there are only between thirty-five and forty thousand HD DVD players in the installed base, that’s impressive.  If DVDs sold that well to DVD player owners, the worldwide production capacity of DVDs couldn’t keep up.  This is likely an indication of HD DVD owners falling in love with the high definition experience and craving content.

Blu-ray Disc

But now things should get interesting.  Blu-ray Disc was slow out of the gate.  Only one player, the Samsung BD-P1000, was available for many months, and that player had a serious initial production flaw.  We now have the Panasonic's DMPBD10.  And the Philips BDP9000 Blu-ray Disc player recently became available at Wal-Mart, where the thousand-dollar player is being discounted to $898.  Apparently, with a modest production capacity, Philips decided to limit initial distribution to one chain.  The player is expected to receive wider distribution as supply builds.

The Samsung’s exclusivity having been trumped, it’s now being discounted to a street price of $800.  And Sony’s BDP-S1, delayed several times, may finally reach the marketplace in about two weeks.  So the format war is definitely heating up.

Consumers are expected to spend $80 million on high definition discs in 2006.  And as I previously reported, the Kagan market research firm predicts that by 2012, high definition disc sales will surpass standard definition DVD sales.  We live in interesting times.