I have no doubt the war will be settled in the retail stores in terms of shelf space. Looks like BB is already moving on to catch the blu wave. They are doing what is in their best interest given the change in the HDM landscape from last Friday's announcment by Warners.

They could make it compatible to add to a refrigerator (probably a possibility given the ones with movie displays) and I still don't think that defintion would fly. As long as it requires the unit it is attached to, it becomes part of what it is atached to. Not it's own sales number IMO if trying to come up with numbers like "attach rates".

Sorry, I think that's faulty logic, but you're welcome to that interpretation.

I'm welcome to it? Was that really necessary?

You're talking about comparing stand alone movie players that connect directly to a display and an addon that requires being connected to another unit first. Classic apples and oranges IMO.

Hence my suggestion that I could see Toshiba make an announcement circa April 2008 that they will phase out the HD-DVD format. Toshiba will then offer a lower-cost combo player as a transition product, then Toshiba goes full-time Blu-ray production around the end of calendar year 2008.

People buy stand-alone players to watch movies. People buy the add-on drive to watch movies. Since the add-on cannot work by itself, it is assumed that people are connecting them to their existing XBox360 or PC to watch movies. Thus, add-on drive = stand-alone player and should be counted as a player sold. Simple concept, really.

200 hours on average??? What'd you get Oblivion GOTY Edition for Christmas
The average game gets nowhere near 200 hours playtime from john Q public.
However, I do get and agree with your point (at 31 discs owned I account for
30 PS3 owners having never bought a single disc at the current attach rate),
just had to get the above out.

I bought mine as both, knowing I wanted it as a Blu-ray player but as a gamer
I had that to fall back on if Blu didn't pan out. As for the PS2, here in the US
it was marginally bought as a DVD player (mostly as a way for parents to
rationalize/condense getting a DVD player for the kid's room), but over in
Japan it was a huge reason for getting one. Not that that matters in this
discussion, just tossing it out there.

The PS3 BD vs Game argument is like this for me. I have never owned a PS, I like my 360 and the exclusives that would have interested me are gone so if I purchase a PS3 it will be for BD. I highly doubt that I will never use its game play functionality. For one there was some downloadable game that came out last year that was supposed to be really good (something about cars I think). My brother had a PS2 and a DVD player connected through a splitter into his coax jack so the PS2 was a DVD player argument doesn't fly for me. Most people I knew who owned a gaming system had an independent DVD player that was superior in their mind. I would prefer not to purchase a PS3 but I feel there is no other "future-proof" BD player available. So I guess on I should send the survey in saying that I plan on using my PS3 as a BD player 95% of the time.

I have the 360 add-on and purchased purely for DVD playback. Attach rates are worthless. I own 60 DVDs, why do they get left out of the attach rate argument with my add-on. Based on the numbers, my attach rate for my 360 would be 30 because the console has playback so does my add-on. With the 360, I think the add-on counts because the people who purchased it use it to playback HD-DVDs but the console does not. Since the PS3 is so hard to pigeonhole, why count each PS3 as .333 of a BD player if you want to calculate BD attach rate. What about those of us who may purchase BD movies before purchasing a player? That skews the number too. The only place attach rates have any value is on media that can be played back through only one device and even then they are not necessarily accurate.

I also noticed this with the Universal going/staying argument. I am going to watch other debates more closely going forward to see if it only applies some of the time or most of the times. The Universal debate could be reduced to one verb. "Are" vs "Could"

The extras argument. I hate to think I am becoming more and more like J6P but I tend to not care that much about extras unless it's a really, really good movie. And then I don't care for the most important extra: commentaries. Now at the same price or for a minimal cost, I still prefer to get the extras in case I'm ever without something to do for several hours.

You are, of course, free to feel that way, but it must be pointed out the the entire consumer electronics industry disagrees with you. The Xbox 360 HD DVD Add-on is counted in the number of player units sold, at least with regard to attach rates (because of the very logical presumption that no one will be purchasing that add-on for any purpose other than to watch HD DVDs). Charts that both include and exclude it are also produced, but primarily to identify the size of the HD DVD community that is using that player, as opposed to "pure standalones".

If so then PS3 is an even more colossal failure than originally thought since few titles even sell to 3% of the installed base.

PS3 is a game machine, with the added feature of Blu-ray playback. PS3's primary purpose is not as a BD player.

Because it is the software that makes profits for the studios, and if you want studios to keep providing software there needs to be profit in it for them. They make nothing on every sale of a PS3. In fact, if reports are true, the only profit from a PS3 is the $20 that the retailer makes on it.

I agree. However, I think that there is no way to seperate PS3 used for/not used for movie playback, so I think every PS3 has to be counted as a Blu-ray player.

That bumps that installed base number way up, but it also kills the attach rate number. Now we have the BD purists who say that attach rate doesn't matter, and the BD haters saying the PS3 shouldn't be included in installed base.

The numbers are what they are. If BD purists insist on including PS3 as a BD player, then they have to live with the fact that the attach rate is dismal. If BD haters want to dismiss the ps3 as a BD player, then they would then have to conceed that the BD attach rate is a phenomenal success.

The actual truth is somewhere in the middle, but since there is absolutely no way of knowing what PS3s are spinning BDs, then, IMO, the safest assumption is that every ps3 is spinning BDs and analyze the numbers from there.

Attach rate IS important. This is where the profits from third parties come from. This is why the XBox360, while selling less units than Wii, is considered to be "winning" the console war. They move more software, which in turn entices publishers to make more software, which in turn moves more software and so on.

Well that makes sense to me. The add-on is sold exclusively for viewing HD-DVD's, where PS3 sales aren't really indicative of who's using PS3's for blu-ray viewing. I don't even see how there can be an argument about this.

And I can't believe I had to try and explain why from a statistics standpoint it makes no sense to compare two things that should not be compared. The stats end up very flawed at best.

And saying what the industry does must be right is like saying what government does must be right.

Saying Transformers sold 13 million dvds sounds successful. Does saying Transformers sold to 5.9% of the dvd user base sound as successful?

It is not about "sounding" successful. 6% of the DVD userbase is a huge financial success. 6% of the BD userbase is not quite such a success, financially speaking. It is a surely a popular title, but is it profitable?

But I have long maintained that any discussion about the sales figures needs to give the titles sold, installed base and the ratio of the two to give a true picture of what is going on. Trumpeting one number while ignoring another is a sure sign of bias.

I <3 HD-DVD!

Wrong.



The anti-J6P elitism in this forum is sometimes stunning. "Lol, J6P doesn't know how cool CSI is!!1"

Out of curiosity, when was the last Warner/New Line/Paramount/Universal-related post in this thread?

^HA! I was wondering the same thing reading these last few pages!

Two posts before this one I just made.

I agree about the elitism, but I do think there is a distinction between the standard everyday consumer and the general membership here, and I would say there is even a divide between the general readership of this sub-forum and the general membership of the forum as a whole. The differences are not necessarily negative, but they do exist.