Posted By:Julia Boorstin

Black Friday is a big day for DVD and player sales but some people may be confused. If you buy "Ratatouille" in high def, you've gotta have a Blu-ray player. If the new high def "Transformers" is your thing, that Blu-ray player on your PS3 is totally useless, you need an HD DVD player.

This year all eyes are on the high definition market and the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray: which side will sell more movies and more players this crucial holiday season?

This showdown involves every single media company. Sony is leading the Blu-ray brigade, with a bunch of manufacturers also supporting the format. So you can watch a Blu-ray disk on a PlayStation3, or on a stand-alone player made by Samsung, Panasonic, or in your Dell computer. Sony's biggest advantage is the studios it has in its court: Sony Pictures (of course), Disney/Buena Vista, 20th Century Fox, MGM, and Lions Gate.

On the other hand, HD-DVD is backed by Microsoft  , which sells an HD-DVD player to connect to its Xbox360, and Toshiba is the main manufacturer of HD DVD players. HD DVD has had Universal exclusive to the format for a while, and as of August got Paramount/DreamWorks, and DreamWorks Animation to be exclusive to the format as well, reportedly in exchange for a $150 million payoff.

HD DVD's biggest advantage is its much lower cost--the lower end players are around $199, about half the cost of a typical lower end Blu-ray player. And earlier this month a price war (led by Wal-Mart , of course) pushed the prices of HD DVD players at some retailers below $100 dollars. At that price, what consumer wouldn't want to go with the cheaper option.

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21.11.2007 - While the two high-definition DVD formats are battling each other for market dominance consumers are having difficulty choosing from either disc format, which is slowing the growth of the HD market, says Windows client business manager Mike Hughes. The DVD industry currently is very widespread and it cannot be denied that it has an incredible turnover, observes Hughes.

"However, it is difficult and potentially very interesting that we have dual high-definition standard that hasn't been reconciled.

"I think everyone in the industry is disappointed that there isn't a single standard that they can get behind."

While the public is holding off from rushing into adopting one disc format over the other the ability to download high-quality video from the internet is increasing.

"However, the difficulty with downloads from the high-definition perspective is simply the amount of memory required to store these movies.

"It might be okay to download for a seven-day rental but to keep in perpetuity most people's PCs would give up after about 50 films."

This is why Hughes thinks that aside from the confusion over formats there is still a need for a hard copy.

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Blu-Ray Backer Approves New HD DVD Standard

by Anton Shilov

11/19/2007 | 03:09 PM

Walt Disney Home Entertainment, a major Hollywood studio and one of the strongest backers of Blu-ray disc format, voted for approval of a preliminary specification of 51GB triple-layer HD DVD media, just like all the backers of HD DVD and unlike some other backers of Blu-ray Association within the DVD Forum, who typically abstain in HD DVD-related votes.

At the Steering Committee meeting in September Walt Disney Home Entertainment voted for triple layer twin-format HD DVD as well as triple layer HD DVD 51GB revision 1.9 preliminary media standards, according to the notes from the event available at the DVD Forum. During the meeting, twelve steering members of the DVD Forum out of twenty approved the former and eleven members approved the latter.

In both cases Walt Disney voted for the new HD DVD standards, whereas Samsung Electronics, which supports both Blu-ray and HD DVD with its Blu-ray disc (BD) and unified Blu-ray/HD DVD players, decided to abstain in voting for the 51GB HD DVD, just like some other members of the Blu-ray Association, who always withdraw from HD DVD votes, namely Hitachi, JVC, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, Sharp and Sony.

Just last week the DVD Forum approved revision 2.0 of triple-layer HD DVD 51GB media, but the detailed results of the vote were not available at press time.

The fact that Walt Disney Home Entertainment, which official stance has always been strong Blu-ray support, may be an indicator that even members of the Blu-ray Association are potentially interested in the forthcoming versions of the HD DVD standard, which has been competing against BD for nearly two years in a war that is unlikely to end soon and which is even called a "stalemate" by Sony's chief executive.

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Nov 8, 2007 09:34

Toshiba has sent all troops to the war field to make a pretty tough christmas for Sony's Blu-Ray. In a fantastic move by Toshiba, Walmart and BestBuy more than 90,000 HD-DVD players sold during last weekend.

Within three days, HD-DVD format significantly increased its installed base and sold nearly as many as the best-selling stand-alone Blu-ray DVD player has sold since its launch.

Toshiba A2 HD DVD was the 20th position on the Google's Hot Trends in thursday November 1st. Near 100,000 , $99 HD-DVD players sold on Nov 2. That's $200 less than Toshiba's $299 list price and $100 off retail pricing of $199. Sony's dominant Blu-ray standalone player,the BDP-S300, is $499 and has shipped about 100,000 since it bowed this summer.

The Format war began in 2004 when Toshiba rejected the offer to work together with Sony. In January of 2007, BDA (Blu-ray Disc Association) Declared victory over Toshiba HD-DVD.

BDA claimed that Blu-ray is the premiere high definition format of choice with 25 different companies having released Blu-ray related products and more than one million PlayStation 3s shipped to the U.S.

Considering PS3 stations sold in US and Europe and Asia, It seems that Blu-Ray is the winner of the fight and has outpaced HD-DVD with an order of 5 to 1.

But the fight has just begun!

In my opinion , Toshiba has the upper hand in the format war, although the number of installations of Blu-ray is much more than HD-DVD, but most of these installations are in form of Playstation 3.

Buying PS3 is not a sign of consumer interest in Blu-Ray. You should consider that sales of Toshiba HD-DVD standalone players outpaced Blu-ray units by nearly 5 times as many units and this number has increased during the last weekend.

Having more standalone players means more support from major movie studios, Paramount and/or Dreamworks recently dropped support for Blu-Ray in favour of HD-DVD and joined Universal and Warner Bros studios, but the fact that Sony is itself a big movie studio (Sony Pictures/MGM) has complicated the matter. Disney and 20th Century Fox support Blu-Ray too.

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By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

November 7, 2007, 12:01 AM

ANALYSIS: Sources close to retailers indicate that Toshiba sold over 90,000 $99 HD DVD players over the weekend, and that figure only represents a portion of the retailers that participated in the frenzy.

According to Video Business, the 90,000 count includes Toshiba HD-A2 players sold at Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City along with a few other brick and mortar outlets. But it apparently doesn't include online retailers who also participated in the price drop, such as

BetaNews' own estimates placed sales at around 40,000 to 70,000 within Wal-Mart alone based on information compiled about stocks at the discount retailer's various locations around the country.

Wal-Mart's move spurred a retailer war over prices of the players, even bringing down the cost of other models as a result when HD-A2 stocks depleted. It's fairly likely that total sales of all HD DVD players eclipsed the 100,000 mark during just the past week.

Sales of the Toshiba HD-A3, the successor to the HD-A2, appeared to be equally brisk, with many retailers selling out of their stocks quickly after the older model became hard to find. At many locations, the newer player was selling for $199 - $100 off its original retail price.

Furthermore, sales of the HD-A2 alone over the past few days are nearly equivalent to total sales of the top Blu-ray player, Sony's BDP-S300, which has shipped 100,000 units since its introduction over the summer.

BetaNews has a request in with Toshiba for full sales numbers, but the company thus far has not provided specific figures.

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