I buy a new toy and of course I have to talk about everything related to it, so now you’re going to get a reasonable amount of HD-DVD news and information. After all, this blog is about A Mike Life, so what else do I have to talk about?
So first off, there were rumors last week concerning the idea of Warner suddenly getting rid their policy of producing high definition movies in both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. This got some people scared, me included since of course I heard it the day after purchasing my own HD-DVD player.
Take it for what it’s worth, but Pravin over at HDDVD.com puts the rest those speculations, quoting an article on Don Lindich’s blog. Don put in a quote from Jim Noonan, Warner’s VP and GM:
Dear Mr. Lindich, We have made no decision to change our present policy which is to produce in both HD DVD and Blu-ray.
I feel a bit better now.
EngadgetHD posted a blog this morning about a study done by The Diffusion Group, which did a survey of consumers looking to get into the HD arena in the next six months.
The point of it was that these types of consumers, known as late bloomers since they usually wait until prices come down on new electronics, tend to spend less money. That could be a big bump for HD-DVD, since their prices are currently much lower than Blu-Ray.
The survey also revealed these late bloomers prefer HD-DVD 45% to 27% for Blu-Ray. Good news? I hope.
Finally, there are a lot of deals going on for HD-DVDs right now, including Buy-One-Get-One-Free bonanzas at Amazon.com and Best Buy.
If you are interested, Amazon has 78 titles for sale, while Best Buy is supposedly having a sale this weekend.
I tried to find the wording of the questions used in the survey but failed. I suppose it’s possible that TDG didn’t bother to clarify that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are both comparable, competing hi-def formats for discs. In that case, the more diverse, larger pool of consumers might not really have understood what they were answering. In other words, they want “high definition DVDs” so they said they’d prefer “HD-DVD”. I’m just speculating.
R.A. Porter’s last blog post..Tastebook.com
Wow, very good question…