sracer

Yeah, but people don't measure their value as a human being by Coca-Cola or Kelloggs either.

bretski

I think you mis-read my reply. I *don't* care about studio payoffs.

Why should we care about payoffs to CE manufacturers, Toshiba in particular? Because this will be the deal that really ends the HDM war. Seems to me that Toshiba's recent press announcement about lowered MSRPs is to give the illusion that they want to continue fighting. Sony/BDA would be more likely to incentivise Toshiba to stop making players if they think Toshiba will keep up the fight. Heck, maybe they'd even strike a deal to share I.P. about player technology...

Deftones

Difference here is if I don't buy Coke, I can buy Pepsi. Or the umteen number of store brands. Same with Kellogg products.

Here, it's one or the other. People invested in one, and are feeling burned. I can't say I totally blame them for being irked.

tonymontana313

Right. Unless a studio is paying me off, I don't give a shit who gets paid off as long as I can get one unified format in the end.

Mr. Cinema

That's the chance they took. Format wars are never risk free.

Deftones

Obviously. I get that. But using the analogy of Coke or Kellogg's isn't appropriate as there are numerous competitors to each of those brands.

wewantflair

You keep posting this assertion without being challenged, so I finally decided to butt in.

Where do you get this idea from? From what other format wars do you derive this claim?

Please don't say VHS/Beta. VHS and Beta were sold primarily as recording devices, and blank beta tapes were and are still available if you have a working deck. Furthermore, studio material on VHS and Beta was not artificially market constrained like it has been in this war.

Let's look at some other format wars:

DVD+RW vs. DVD-RW: Most manufacturers supported both formats. Eventually, the formats effectively merged.

MMC/SD/xD/Memory Stick/blahblah: Again, this is a recordable format and there are tons of blanks on the market. Even blank MMC cards are still available.


So I really must know: what format wars have been risky?

Burnt Thru

dvd/divx, sacd/dvd-a, beta/vhs off the top of my head. despite your assertion vhs/beta were very much about pre-recorded media. that they also had recordable as a major feature doesn't alter that fact. nor did it put all studios on both formats from the get-go.

dsa_shea

I'm getting tired of paying close to 1.50 a 2 liter of Dr. Pepper when I see Coke and Pepsi go for right around a buck but I continue to pay it because I enjoy it. If you want to be a consumer of a particular product then you assume the cost/risk/reward of buying the product.

wewantflair

I'm having a bit of trouble deciphering all that, but I think I'll give it a go.

You can spin it all you want, but the battle of VHS and Beta was fought over recordability, not pre-recorded media. There was market parity in terms of releases between the two formats for years before VHS gained superiority due to its recording advantages. Furthermore, it was a viable product for over 5 years. This certainly minimizes the risk of ownership.

DIVX was a low-risk proposition. All Divx players were also DVD players. Furthermore, you hardly paid anything for DIVX discs since they were effectively rentals. So let's scratch that one off completely.

SACD/DVDA purchasers have experienced virtually no market instability whatsoever. An abundance of manufacturers make dual format players, and most SACD discs are actually hybrids that will play on all CD players.

As I believe that eventually, the same will happen with BD and HD DVD, I believe the risk of HD DVD discs being useless in the future is very low. The whole point of this post was to disagree with the notion that there has always been a substantial risk when participating in a format war.

Burnt Thru

what recording advantage? by the time pre-recorded media started disapearing from stores there was parity in record times between these formats. vhs and beta were very widely used for pre-recorded media, and once the media disappeared from stores beta owners felt betrayed. this is an unusual idea of yours that these formats were primarily recordable and hence safe purchases.

nope. people still had to decide which format to purchase in the form of the media. just because the characteristics of the particular format battles don't exactly align with this currently ending one doesn't mean they didn't take place and that the risk of failure wasn't part of the consumer's decison process.

sacd and dvd-a have failed to catch on with the general population. some would argue due to an extended format war. others due to lack of interest in highdef audio. the point remains that anyone who bought into either of these formats is now experiencing their failure to bring a wide sellection of material to market. hence: risk.

darkside

I don't blame this on a format war. The masses flat out don't care about sound. Even CDs now have limited dynamic range so they sound good on earbuds and compressed to MP3.

I bought all the SACDs I could and enjoy listening to them, but the market for them being so tiny was the problem.

wewantflair

It's not unusual at all; it just doesn't follow the misguided conventional wisdom. Even taking all you said and discounting everything I said, I notice you don't address the length of the war. At an absolute minimum, the war lasted 5 years, and many people got hundreds of titles as well as robust and novel recording uses out of them. This is by definition a low-risk proposition. The longer one owns a product, the lower his risk of investment.

The point is that they didn't buy DIVX media at all - they rented it. You paid $4.50 for a DIVX disc, which is the cost of a rental. Therefore, there is zero risk attached to "ownership" of DIVX discs, since you don't own them.

You again fail to address the crux of my argument, which is that buying either format is low risk. You draw a conclusion of risk based on lack of market penetration when such a conclusion is not only invalid, it's crazy. There are literally thousands of SACD and DVD-A titles available. There are high quality players across a broad spectrum of manufacturers that are able to play all discs. Nothing in life is guaranteed 100% mass adoption - but to say that these formats were a risky proposition for consumers is just nutty.

tylergfoster

I don't understand this argument going on here. The argument is not necessarily about a format war at all -- laserdisc was not really competing against anything, but if you were an early adopter of the format you still took the same risk as was being taken by buying into Blu-Ray or HD-DVD at the beginning of this format war. It doesn't matter if there is a competing technology, if you buy into a cutting edge tech that isn't yet adopted by the mainstream that's the risk, regardless of its competition.

And yes, it IS a risk. You can argue there isn't a specific format war precedent for this, but to argue that people should have been able to exclusively buy into Blu-Ray or HD-DVD without worrying that one or the other format was going to go under is just silly. Even from the very, very, very beginning, we knew this was a battle and one or the other was going to go the way to the dodo. No sympathy.

chanster

as far as i'm concerned there was no risk for me buying an a-2. i sold off the free media (during the amazon glitch 3 free plus take cost of one off) and 4/5 freebies..the a-2 cost me less than the upconverting sony dvd player i bought it a costco. so i have a nice upconverting player, enjoyed some hd media and if (or when) Blu Ray players go down in price and are the new standard, i will pick one up..

Drexl

Video games. There have been many game systems that didn't last long, even for the limited life of a console. Sega didn't offer anything to owners of the 32X, Saturn or Dreamcast.

Brooklyn

The Saturn and Dreamcast may have been cut short by a bit, but to say
nothing was offered for them? My 112 game Saturn and Dreamcast collections
(oddly enough I have the same number of titles for both systems) say hi

Drexl

I meant that Sega didn't offer compensation for those who bought into the systems and felt burnt when they didn't last.

PopcornTreeCt

I don't see why Sega should offer compensation. You can still buy a Dreamcast and a bunch of games and have more fun with it than with a PS3.

I don't think video games are a good example because everyone knows they have a short life span. They are still making PS2 games when they should be killing that off altogether to focus all their resources on the PS3.

Supermallet

No, I really don't care. I didn't care when people screamed "Pay off!" about Paramount, and I don't care now. How does a pay off affect us at all, now that it's happened? There was a stalemate between the two formats, and Sony broke it with money and incentives. Toshiba tried to do the same thing with Paramount, but it didn't work. Okay, deal's done, let's move on already.

atlantamoi

[subtitle swear words for those at work]

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Mr. Cinema

Perhaps I should have left off the s, but the reason my posts have not been challange is because they can't be. If there are 2 movie formats that require 2 different players to watch all of the movies, with 2 different sides supporting each format, you're telling me there is no risk involved if you only pick 1 side? You don't think there's a risk by possibly picking the side that loses?

I've owned both formats for a long time, so I don't care that those who bought a $99 HD DVD player in November may feel burned about the WB news. I'm quite certain they realized that machine is unable to play the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, the Spiderman trilogy, the Die Hard series, and hundreds of other BD exclusive titles.

And now with these drastic price cuts, Toshiba is doing more harm by getting new customers to buy their products, knowing full well that they only have 2 major studios to support it.

I just find it bizarre you think there's no risk involved in this war. Are you still pissed that WB will be Blu-only after May?

redbill

I remember the Dreamcast dropped to $99 just as it was dying, and many consumers (including myself), didn't know that Sega was killing it before they bought.

darkside

Toshiba has hardware on store shelves and probably new players in production. They are going to try and move that hardware before they call it quits.

Burnt Thru

duration of ownership doesn't mitigate initial risk, it simply rewards the gamble taken and potentially produces a positive outcome. since new tech takes time to be adopted the first couple of years generally have a relatively small percentage of the total consumers in ownership. this means a larger percentage owned beta for a far shorter period before it was phased out. i suspect you have a distorted frame of reference if you think "many" people got hundreds of tapes. our collecting mania on these boards is not the common trend amoung the general population. though the risk remains the same, since those buying into either beta or vhs (early or late) had no way of knowing if their format was going to last, or for how long.



they bought dvds, which was not a tech supported by fox, disney, and another i can't remember. initially. these people had no way to know that dvd would survive or that it would mushroom into the phenomena it has become. ie, they took a risk.



thousands of discs is a tiny drop in the ocean of music available to consumers via cd and other media. to pretend that the selection of music on sacd/dvd-a is anything other than extremely limited would be highly inaccurate. classical music has some representation, but more popular modern artists are very poorly served.