That $18.38 is the distributor cost. He said he got a discount on top of that.

Does anyone find it interesting that 2 of the 3 DIVX exclusive compainies are the now the BD exclusive companies?

Sorry typed that wrong earlier.

That was a great article. I never really looked at it like this but if you wanted to hurt Sony, you could go and buy the PS3 and then buy nothing else for it, lol. Anyways Sony has certainly gotten themselves into a pickle there is no arguing that. The amount of money and reputation on the line with this one machine is unlike anything we have ever seen before. They have literally placed the entire company at stake over their gaming machine. From an investors point of view it was and still is a remarkable foolish thing to do especially with the market changing as much as it has. This article is speaking the truth, unless things go well for Sony from here on out this could do massive damage to the company, maybe irreparable damage.

PS...

Just hypothetically speaking, what would happen if Sony lost to Nintendo in Japan, and Microsoft in the US and possibly Europe?

From that article

I thought it used a regular HDMI cable. Anyone know?

I would assume not, but that does not mean they will not have the "Official PS3 HDMI Cable" setting on the shelf next to machines with an absurd price on it.

Yeah, what Namja said - I meant it would be a regualr HDMI cable, just PS3 branded and at a high price.

Don't you mean it'll probably use regular HDMI cable, but Sony will be selling its "Official PS3 HDMI Cable" at an insane price a la Monster Cables?

Any such cable, if it ever exists, would likely be a Monster brand, not Sony. Monster usually gets such deals. The pics do show a normal connector, unlike the other connections on most video games. These are available at Sony's own site.

Yeah right. With 65,000 HD DVD players due to be out by October (if the information in this post is accurate), the notion that 500,000 players could be sold by the end of Q1, 2007, strikes me as ludicrous. Who all is going to be buying those players? Every HDTV owner? J6P?

If Disney (and/or Fox) really are waiting for an installed base of 500,000 players to go format neutral, we will have a long wait ahead of us.

I will continue to hope that their criteria for going neutral will be somewhat less challenging.

Well, such press release comments/assumptions are hardly ever fully accurate. But using the precise wording, just for fun:

"Disney is said to be waiting for 500,000 players on the market."

"On the market" does not mean sold to end users. Adding in the 360 add-on and some other companies besides Tosh, it is at least theoretically possible to have that many built in the next 6 months. Would help to have some press from those other companies, though.

If every HDTV owner were to buy one it would be well above 500,000 units. HDTV's are flyin of shelves these days and while I dont have numbers in front of me I guarantee there are well more than 5000,000 HDTV's sold in the US.

As for how many units it would take sold to get the remaining motion picture studios to jump on board HD-DVD is anyones guess but dont think even for a second that a number doesnt exist. No company in thier right mind would continue to not support HD-DVD if it sold a large amount of units, just how large you want to make that number is the only thing to really argue about. Would they jump on board at 500,000? 750,000? 1,000,000? Again we dont know what the number is but there is a number where they will eventually join up.

People are just forgetting that these are corporations whose bottom line is how much money did we make last year and what can we do this year to make that even more money. Alliances crumble in the reality of the corporate world.

PS...

Considering todays news, I will say that one other company is about to announce their stand-alone player.

Uhh...Fox? yes it is.

Figure most titles will sell around 25,000 by the end of Q1 2007, at least to retailers (based on WB saying their initial pressings of that amount are gone). Some A-listers like Batman Begins and Superman will many many sell more. Some will sell less. If Buena Vista, had put out 20-40 titles between May 2006 and Q1 2007, that would be 500,000-1,000,000 in unit sales they're leaving on the table. I'm not sure how much each studio makes on each title but I don't think $5-$15 is unreasonable.

Work those numbers. It's their loss.

What's worse, I'm sure many are delaying or eliminating BV/Fox/Sony DVD purchases until they appear in HD DVD or until Blu-Ray players are priced attractively.

Which was today's news? The Samsung laptop?

Spiky's a Smarty.

And in other news about PS3 bankrupting Sony, these battery recalls sure don't help. Now it's IBM...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060928/...vo_recall_dc_6

Is this the 4th company?

I presume they would prefer not to fuss with supporting two formats (which has additional manufacturing and distribution costs) and hope that their chosen format will win. Eventually, they hope, we will all be forced to buy into BD (except for DFNYC, of course!). At which time they will sell us the BD versions of their titles.
That gets back to Spiky's "drop in the bucket analogy": The number of SD DVD sales forgone must be tiny compared to total sales of major DVD titles because the number of HD DVD player owners is tiny compared to DVD player owners. And some HD DVD supporters likely ARE buying Fox/Disney/Sony DVDs since they are unavailable on HD DVD.

Oh, I'll grant you that the installed base of HDTVs is much greater than 500K. But what percentage of those owners

1) are aware of the existence of HD DVD?

2) are willing to buy into HD DVD despite the format war?

3) are willing to buy an HD DVD player despite the cost ($500 is a lot of money to many)?

4) care enough about PQ of movies to want something better than what they have now? Perhaps they bought their HDTVs primarily to watch football or something. And remember, some assume that having an HDTV means EVERYTHING they watch is already HD.

I just can't see HD DVD (and BD, for that matter) being anything other than a niche market for the time being. 500,000 HD DVD players sold is asking a lot. By Q1 next year? Ridiculous. If I am wrong by next April, please feel free to gloat. I'll join you in celebrating.
I don't doubt that there is a limit beyond which the BD exclusive studios will have to re-think their strategy. I'm just hoping it isn't as high as 500,000 players sold, because that is going to take a long time.

IMHO, of course.

Enough on this, the weather is too glorious here to spend any more of the day inside!

4th announcement by my count. But wasn't IBM the 3rd company? Maybe this is for those after the sale of "Thinkpad" to Lenovo. Correction x2: Panny was the 3rd company, Tosh #4. I also notice that HP recalled a few thousand soon after Dell in April, but hardly any compared to Dell or Apple. I suppose that makes IBM/Lenovo #6.

None of them being Sony seems interesting.

I agree with you, even though I did hypothesize about how it could happen. I doubt we'll see that many of both formats combined by that time.

And I don't think the PS3 should be counted as "BD players" for any analysis of that format. Video game consoles have very different sales charts.

Toshiba was in that mix as well.

Yeah, I'm correcting myself as I go. Here's what I see for 2006:

HP.........15,700 (not sure if these are Sony's)
Dell........4.1 mil
Apple......1.8 mil
Panny......4,000
Tosh.....340,000
IBM.......526,000
Sony.............0 (must just sell them to others)

Makes you wonder why they didn't just recall all the ones that they've supplied to.

I'm just glad my wife's Macbook has Li-Poly instead of Li-Ion. Much safer.

Li-Ion probably should never have been used for something this powerful in the first place. It's barely controlled in a AA battery, let alone an 85 watt monster. I'd say their mistake is using it at all, not that they apparently failed.

I agree Josh, but Fox has always done things to the beat of their own drum. I think the idea all along has been that if Toshiba gets 500K players in the market none of the exclusive studios, save Sony, will want to throw that kind of cash inflow away regardless of BD+ or not. Fox didn't have a problem with D-Theater copy protection after all. Hell, Fox was pretty firm on Divx as well.

How many HD-DVD players have been sold to date not shipped?