Dual Blu-ray/HD DVD from LG at CES!
Finally someone has the sense to launch a dual format player – but what will this do for sales of already expensive existing single format next generation players?
The next-generation wars started in earnest in 2006 with the respective launches and retail availability of standalone Blu-ray and HD DVD players from companies like Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Toshiba and others. We also saw the availability of the PS3 and the HD DVD add-on for the Xbox 360.
For anyone that wanted to show off HD quality movies on the latest next-generation player to their family and friends for Christmas 2006, the opportunity was there, provided you could easily afford it.
But the mass consumer market isn’t about the early adopter who is willing to put up with initial bugs and can afford the price premium that always exists with the latest technology on launch and for a short while after its release.
When you have two competing formats taking over from a single DVD format that consumers had become well accustomed to for well over half a decade, there was always the potential for a replay of the trouble the world’s consumers faced when forced to choose between Betamax and VHS.
But 2007 will signal the reduction of prices for Blu-ray and HD DVD players, not only thanks to normal price erosion thanks to competition and the laws of supply and demand, but thanks to LG’s new dual Blu-ray and HD DVD player.
There’s scant information available on the new player, with only a promise to launch it in early 2007. There’s no pricing available yet, although we assume that as first generation product, it will be expensive too.
Yet the emergence of such a product would instantly cause anyone thinking of buying a standalone player to pause until they have more information about LG’s unit. Of course, how many people are expected to buy a player in January after paying for Christmas is a good question, with the likely answer being ‘not many’. Anyway that wanted high-def and could afford would have easily been able to buy it in December.
But for the rest of us that don’t have unlimited bank balances, few people are truly rushing out to buy next-gen players. Prices are simply too expensive, the units on offer won’t actually record high-definition TV shows and movies now on offer by free-to-air and cable channels, and the knowledge that updated versions are always on the way along with a series of firmware updates making people think twice before spending their hard earned cash.
And there was always the rumor of a dual next-generation deck. LG and Samsung have battled it out in the rumor stakes, but every time an executive at Samsung hinted they might be thinking of this, there was always the next-day denial, as if someone at Sony had called Samsung to say ‘hey, what’s going on?’.
Whether it happened that way or not, LG is the company that will force all other next-gen player manufacturers to reconsider their plans. Philips, who created the DVD+R standard in competition with the DVD-R standard, took at least three generations of DVD+R/RW recorder before they gave in, and offered a DVD/Hard Drive recorder that worked with both plus and minus discs – something their ‘DVD minus’ promoting competition had also given in to as well.
But in an world where progress seems to speed up every year, the change from Blu-ray or HD DVD only units has only lasted for a few months before someone, in this case LG, has decided to change things at last.
While the first unit will be expensive, follow up units from LG and others will get progressively cheaper, while recording units to arrive this year as well. Christmas 2007 will see players and recorders at much more realistic prices, but they’ll have to face threats from Apple’s iTV, the Xbox 360 movie and TV show download service and ever increasing hard drives that will make 50GB of space on a plastic disk seem to small to worry about.
Prices for standalone players will surely have to drop, too – unless LG’s dual system is ridiculously expensive. High prices can only last for so long in this case.
Big cheers to LG for being brave enough to be the first to bridge the gap. Now we await the response of their competitors, as the speed all the manufacturers and movie studios work at will determine just how quickly the new formats are taken up by the already indebted public.
One thing’s for sure: their efforts up until now have definitely not had the desired effect. The battle to launch high definition was finally won, but the war has a very long way to go just yet.
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