Blu-ray Player Prices Hit 2008 Highs

An anonymous reader writes "HD DVD is almost gone and Blu-ray prices are already on their way up. TG Daily went through average retail prices of some of the popular Blu-ray players and found that you should expect to pay at least $400 for an entry-level Blu-ray player, while you could get a player for less than $330 in February. It really should not be a surprise for all of us, but it is interesting to see how quickly retail adjusted to the new situation and increased prices."

Great- no more format war!

[goatpunch]

This monopoly is so much better for the consumer.

PS3 Sales the motivator here?

[Gat0r30y]

At 400 bucks, why not just drop an extra 60 for a PS3? [google.com] Perhaps Sony has a good marketing strategy, make all the other BR players so damned expansive that people wont mind dropping the extra dough for a game system even if they don't want/need it.

Well blow me over with a wistle

[giorgist]

This may reflect badly on them in the long run.
The price has little to do with cost, but more to do with what you can get away with.
Ultimately making the consumer more pessemistic

G

Supply and demand at work

[DrXym]

With the format war over and uncertainty removed, retailers are starting to sell these things close to their MSRP again. I shouldn't worry though. More and more models are appearing from more and more manufacturers including no-names so the prices are going to head south.

Prices in Euros

[Goonie]

How much of this is due to the fact the US dollar has dropped a lot in value recently?

Not that this is a bad thing - it will help to correct the imbalances in the US economy far more than bleating about NAFTA or whatever other nonsense is coming out of your politicians at the moment...

Psst... you haven't won the war yet.

[nobodyman]

This is an utterly foolish move by manufacturers and retailers, because it presumes that HD-DVD was the *only* obstacle to widespread adoption. In fact, Blu-Ray may have won the battle vs. HD-DVD, but it is far from winning the war. Digital download is becoming increasingly popular, and many consumers are just fine with their current DVD's.

Some advice to the Blu-Ray camp: You still haven't convinced us to buy, and raising prices ain't gonna help things.

Alternative Theory: Joe Consumer sees $400 DVD

[mkcmkc]

...player and says "Why would I want to buy that?".

Re:Great- no more format war!

[RobBebop]

Calling Sony's victory with Blu-Ray over HD-DVD a "monopoly" is like saying Sirius' proposed merger with XMSR is a monopoly.

No sir, I don't buy it. With as many entertainment and content distribution options completing in the Audio and Visual domains... no one company can ever establish a monopoly. The only thing that can happen is the companies become entrenched with technology that isn't adopted, supported, or interoperated with and that leads to business failure.

And yes, Sony bought the format war with hundreds of millions of potentially well-spend bribes, but their is no way for them to bribe there way to some kind of vertically-integrated "entertainment" monopoly. It would cost too much. I am not worried, unless they make a play at merging with Comcast or something.

Re:Still competing with DVD

[AbsoluteXyro]

I certainly hope those prices do come down. I just bought an OPPO upconverting DVD player to tide me over until prices become palatable. I am not paying more than $200 for a god damn movie player, I don't care how H it's D's are.

Re:Great- no more format war!

[fm6]

Please. Do you consider DVDs to be a monopoly? How about CDs? A standard format is not a "monopoly", not unless the format is proprietary.

Here's what's going on: both Blu Ray and HD-DVD players were being sold at a minimal profit — a loss, even — because both sides were trying to grab market share. End of format war, end of need to grab market share.

The problem has been that everybody with any brains has been waiting for the format war to end before plunking down their hard-earned cash. When consumers don't buy, sales are low, and when sales are low, there are no economies of scale. No economies of scale means high manufacturing costs, and thus high retail costs — unless the product is being sold at a loss.

So of course prices go up. But that's a short term thing. Right now, every consumer electronics company on the planet is gearing up to manufacture Blu Ray players by the million. When you manufacture something on that scale (especially electronics, where the fundamental technology is subject to Moore's Law) prices crash.

In a year or two, Blu Ray players will be as cheap as DVD players are now.

Re:Great- no more format war!

[iapetus]

Toshiba was working hard at the bribery as well. That's not how Sony won the format war - they did it with the PS3, plain and simple. An excellent player, sold in a business model where it doesn't need to make a profit (and can even afford to make a loss), with millions of people who will buy it for its non-movie functionality and likely end up with at least one or two movies on top. HD-DVD lost when Microsoft didn't include it as the standard drive for the XBox 360.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[Jeremy Erwin]

Oh, and the other joke is that BD Live just brings Blu-ray up to (nearly) the same level as HD DVD. Yes, at the time WHV threw its weight behind Blu-ray, Blu-ray was both more expensive than HD DVD, and less powerful (capacity excepting.)

Did you actually use those more "powerful" features?

Re:Great- no more format war!

[lcohiomatty86]

I would say that this has nothing to do with monopoly and a lot to do with the prices going back up to what they should be, with the cost of technology and all. It takes a LOT of processing power to decrypt and play an HD disk so it is understandable that at this point the hardware would be expensive. also, there are a lot of R&D costs to recover that were spent in developing the blu-ray players. over time as the technology gets cheaper and more units get sold, prices will go down with competition.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[Admiral Ag]

The obvious move is to get a PS3 then. It is a decent media centre as well, and everyone who buys one can have the added pleasure of humiliating me at Warhawk, since I am the worst player on God's green earth.

Sometimes I wonder if the anti-PS3 crowd are simply those people who publicly predicted its failure and are now desperate not to be proven wrong. e.g. the "I'd rather have trousers full of rabid ferrets than buy a PS3!!!" meme.

I bought a PS3 out of curiosity with Blu Ray, and after watching 2001 and A Clockwork Orange in HD (would buy Eyes Wide Shut for the nudie bits, but wife objects), I'd say it was well worth it if you're a film buff.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[fyrie]

I did. Heroes season 1, 300, and Beowulf all have some pretty sweet PiP. My blu-ray player is a drive in an HTPC so I'm pretty safe profile update-wise, but I'm just sayin' that the interactivity/extras that HDDVD is capable of now crushes what's out there for blu-ray at the moment.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a safe bet that 99% of the "anti-PS3 crowd" haven't no interest in Bluray or any other HDM system

Re:Still competing with DVD

[gad_zuki!]

>So my impression that Blu-ray rises just because people start to see reasonable displays to watch those HD discs with

I have a reasonably display (37") for HD and really dont have a need to jump to the format. DVDs from my old Sony 480p DVD player look amazing. What looks terrible is my SD directivo. Right now I'm motivated to buy a HD tivo and HD service from directv. The cost of this for 12 months is what a bluray player costs me today. I watch more TV than I do movies. I seriously doubt I'm unique in this regard.

That said, the first thing people are going to do when they get an HD set is pay for HD cable or satellite. They arent going to spend 600 dollars on some fancy player for movies. They might if it costs 200 dollars or less, but that wont happen for a long time if ever. Think of all the HD content Im going to get for only 10 dollars more than Im paying now.

That said I doubt the digital download revolution will ever happen but HD via cable and satellite is here. Toss in some on-demand services and theres very little incentive to get a bluray player. For film geeks and videophiles it'll be a must-have, but then again so was the laserdisc.

Re:Psst... you haven't won the war yet.

[manekineko2]

Some advice to the cheap-ass camp: You ain't an us. I pay my nanny more than $400 a week.

Some advice to the ostentatiously rich camp: You don't get adoption of a format by selling it only to the ostentatiously rich. That's how you end up with laser disc.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[danielsfca2]

I think you're a little off the mark with the "memory" comments. I don't think the amount of memory (RAM) has much of a bearing over downloadable content. 1GB or 2GB is absolutely enough to play even HD content. I know because I've played a Blu-Ray rip (in x264) on my dvr PC which has 2GB of RAM. When you say "2GB. In other words, not enough for more than one movie. If that," I think you are thinking of hard drive space and not memory. I clicked the Dell link in your post and looked at the cheapest pc on that page, the one that's $379. It comes with a 250GB hard drive standard, which is the smallest I've seen on a mainstream desktop lately. 320 or 500GB is just as common. Even 250GB is plenty of room to store lots of downloaded movies, be they in h.264, xviD, or even full-on drive-hogging MPEG-2. And I would expect that someone who bought movies for download would just grab a USB2.0 hard drive at Costco if they ran out of room for the movies. Cost: under $200. Install time: 2 minutes. Capacity gain: +750GB.

Also I think most PCs, even cheap ones, that you see from here on out are going to come with 3GB of RAM or more, since you need that in order to run Vista without losing your mind.

By the way, your first paragraph is absolutely right. Even if I did have an HDTV (I don't), and didn't have a ban on Sony-backed crap in my house (I do), I would wait a while on buying a Blu-Ray player at these prices. $200? Try $50.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[EggyToast]

But, how is that different from "Super collector's bonus editions" of DVDs? Same movie, but more outtakes and commentary? It's par for the course for DVDs that came out early in DVD's lifecycle to have a re-release with more "features." If you care enough for the features, you plunk down the change. If you just want the movie, you're already set.

Re:Great- no more format war!

[Trogre]

Okay, but what makes you think the BR consortium is going to suddenly start dishing out licences to the Chinese knockoff shops? I don't know what they charge, but even if they do loosen their exclusivity, I don't see the price of a licence being practical for cheap manufacturing to make a difference. They're really that paranoid about losing control.

This format (I'm not going to call it a standard) is much more tightly controlled than DVD or the CD.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[ecavalli]

But you're forgetting the most important Blu-Ray player of all: the PlayStation 3.

I'm no PS3 zealot, but the system is not only the most popular BD player (by a huge margin), but it's also what the average person thinks of when they hear the word Blu-Ray. Sony's decision to pin the hopes of their new format on a game machine that just so happens to be very easily updated with whatever future tech Sony invents was a clever move by the firm, and it's going to continue to pay off, regardless of how inferior the other BD players might be.

To the average person, those other Blu-Ray players simply don't exist.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[pionzypher]

Bravo sir, bravo.
You have, in one posting both lambasted the wastefulness of our society and managed to take a jab at the download model. So which is it? The HD wars left me a bit blase regarding the upgrade. Coincidentally, my old DVD player works as well. Thus, I will most likely avoid purchasing a BD player. I am aware that there is a perfectly viable market for BD, I won't debate it. Your arguments though seem to be based on the presumption that BD is more "futureproof". This, I would argue is irrelevant. It seems plausable that consumers would opt for a disc-less system, given a viable source for HD content and a HT player with a few TB of storage. I may very well be off the rocker on this, but most of the arguments against it also applied to Mp3s not so long ago.
 
    I suppose my point is that yes, DVD still works. The HD content on television isn't overly compelling. If I have a burning desire to watch a movie in HD, I download it. So far, Planet Earth is the sole HD movie that imo was worth watching in HD. I'll wait to buy until they're either far less expensive or the features and content unavailable in DVD, are compelling enough. If at that time, there is no alternative then yes... I will eat my hat and purchase a BD.

Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

List all those companies selling players that you can actually buy without going mail-order or web.

That count is...um 1. Sony. Yeah, you can get others, but not easily. So let's give you an additional 1/2 because you're technically right. For all intents and purposes, only Sony is making players. There's another company making them but they're currently getting sued for making players that actually don't work. At anything.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[Hodejo1]

I posted this on /. Saturday HD-DVD and the Early Adopter Premium [slashdot.org]. HD-DVD is dead, but with new-in-box players now so cheap ($75) and HD-DVD movies dropping to less than ten bucks - Amazon just announced they will unload titles for $8.95 - the article makes a strong case that the dead technology has arguably become the better fiscal strategy. How? The user goes HD-DVD until Blu-ray player prices drop below $100. For less than the present day $400 cost of a Blu-ray player you can buy an HD-DVD player today ($75) + a Blu-ray player tomorrow ($100) + 22 HD-DVD videos from Amazon.

Re:Great- no more format war!

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

Do you consider DVDs to be a monopoly?

Definitely*. Try producing a DVD player in the US without paying a lot of money to the DVD copy control association [dvdcca.org] and agreeing to implement their DRM. It won't take you long to hear from their lawyers. It only a few days for ME to hear from them back when I hosted some open source DVD stuff on my web server.

* I'm assuming you're talking about commercial, consumer video DVD stuff here since that's what the whole thread is about.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[zippthorne]

"Nothing's stopping you from buying the movie and then ripping it of all the extraneous garbage."

Nothing but the law. Unless you program your own DRM circumvention software, you have to obtain it from someone who is breaking the law simply by giving/selling it to you.

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[pixelslinger]

What do you mean? Violent confrontation is still used every day!

Re:Look how quickly I adjust too

[i_b_don]

$200 is not a lot to pay for a HD player. Have you seen what plasma TV's are going for? You think people will plop down $1-4k on a big screen HD ready plasma TV and squirm at $200?!

I don't think you understand this market. The sub $200 is when low income people buy players whereas middle income and high income people will adopt way before that point. There are a lot of people in the "middle income" bracket who have $5k entertainment setups and they won't have a problem with $200.

d

But who cares ?

[speedlaw]

Possibly the most pointless flame war on the internet, right after the hams with "morse code vs. no code", is this HD DVD vs. Blu Ray. Both will play a HD disc. Both are locked down with DRM. Both solidify the current system of "we distribute, you bu¥, and no copying", just like 1979. HDMI-HDCP are far from a great idea...technically....but tech is not the idea...locking in the distribution system is. Why do you think each side fought for the monopoly ? Just this reason...the ability to dictate price, and for the endless residuals for the IP in the player. A standard DVD, on my 50 inch 1080 set, still looks good enough that I don't feel the need to run out and buy the HD disc. Also, has anyone noticed the raft of second tier films the studios are slowly releasing to get maximum bounce out of the old catalog to desperate buyers ? Really...people care about this ??