The Market Will Decide The Winner...

Question: Who here would buy a dedicated HD DVD player when we are (possibly) all going to own a PS3 at some point in our gaming lives? I think a lot of people who play games will side with the PS3 purely for financial reasons.

As HD DVD is not directly supported by any current gaming machine I see no reason that I will own one. Except if it becomes the standard for PC, in which case I will own one in a laptop.

Given that I was not going to buy a stand alone HD DVD player, nor a BR machine, the only format I will support is the one that sneaks into my home in either a laptop or console. I think of the PS3 as the trojan horse that sneaks the format into our houses. I doubt early adoption for dedicated BR or HD DVD players will be that high. After the launch of the PS3 suddenly a huge amount of people will have BR players before the HD DVD format has fully taken off.

Frankly you could sell the PS3 as a budget BR player, that would probably equal the price of a HD player. I think that if the Blu Ray format did not have the PS3 on it's side, it would not stand a chance.

 

A lot of interesting opinions.

For mine, I think that HD content is a really tough sell in the first place. Take my parents, as classic Joe Public consumers: they have much more disposable income than I have, but you ask my dad what HD is and he'll tell you it's what's written on his old floppy disks. They know fuck all about HD and won't for another decade, and then only during the brief period where their current TV breaks and they have to go about buying a new one. And all they'll want is something to play their DVD's and VHS's on (and they can't see the difference in quality between those two anyway). Some saleskid will techno-babble them into a HD set and they'll forget everything as soon as it's set up. Expect this to be the case for 90% of the market. There's a vocal minority of people online who are technically literate, are picking up HD sets early, and giving off the impression that the revolution has started. As far as I can tell, it hasn't really.

With that in mind, getting the hardware in homes is going to be the challenge. Consumer apathy will mean that most people don't care enough to go out and buy a HD-DVD player (a standard which has equally obnoxious DRM to Blu-ray last I checked, btw). If a Blu-ray player is in the front room anyway with the PS3, then people will buy the discs. Same as DVD with PS2. If you have the player, you "may as well use it".

If Microsoft start bundling HD-DVD drives in with the 260, then things get interesting...

 

why would pc use HD-DVD? a quite costy one is just 15GBs.... dual layers DVD are 9GBs, and still too costy....

i would prefer going on with DVD-5 personally, at least for my PCs. BR discs at 25GBs per layer are a REAL improvement.... sure, they'll be a little costier than HD-DVD, but as soon as technology takes root....

for what concerns Video, i don't are for either of the one, but i'll end just with a BR disc player (ps3, probably), and not a HD-dvd (no xbox 360) and i WON'T buy a standalone player.

just my 2 cents

 

I just don't see a game console setting the bar for the next video standard. Many many many people own an Xbox or Ps2, but that number is small compared to the amount of people who own DVD players. How many people do you know use thier game console as thier DVD player? Not very many. Usually it's in the bedroom or the kid's room, the "main" DVD player is out in the living room with the big TV. That's the one everyone uses.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to get a recordable blue ray drive, I just don't see it happening for a few years yet.

 

That might be true now that you can get a DVD player for $30.00 but for many the PS2 was their first experience with DVD.

 

actually, I know many people who have an xbox in their living room, and use that as a dvd player. It kinda eliminates the redundancy of having a standalone dvd player. Also think of all the college kids living in dorms who when hooked on a format will probably stick with it.

It's not like no one uses that option.

 

But think of the MILLIONs of people that have standalone DVD Players, its bound to be HUGE

 

Well the American public is famous for picking the cheaper alternative, whether it's Wal-Mart or air travel or electronics. We pretty much get off on seeing how far we can make $1 stretch. There are always high end users who pay the money, but by and large price is a bigger factor in the States than in other countries, or so it seems. Since the US buys the most products it might be the cheap middle class deciding who will win worldwide. And if Wal-Mart chooses one over the other, it's game over right then and there.

 

chip already tested a blue ray RW-drive actually... and they are said to get in mass production soon. the technology is ready (and by the way they are supposed to cost something like 1300$ [only 150$ more then a HD-DVD recorder, soooo.....])

 

As for the blueray burners, sony is trying to make those illegal in the US. I'm reasonably sure they'll fail, but they may cause it to get stuck in court for a few months.

 

Wouldn't eliminating Blue Ray burners pretty much kill the format. No one would want one in their PC (atleast to the same scale as CD/DVD) if you can't burn anything, companies make big backups and if the format stores 25 gig, great, but if they can't even burn with it.

If Sony suceeds they'll either fail horribly or have to change their minds later.