Hello loyal fans and enthusiastic devoted readers for life (Yes…that means you…all 3 of you who come to our site at least twice a week).  This week’s rant is a lot shorter than usual for good reason.  Dip and I are working on a continuation of last week’s rantwhich we will publish this Thursday.  However, I did not want a lack of articles from Homsher to force you into a state of mental desperation which may lead to bouts of manic depression or intense stomach pains.



 

HD DVD recently died a slow gruesome death at the hands of Blu Ray.  Let me start this story by saying that I am the proud owner of an HD DVD player.  I purchased it a few months back for several reasons:

1. High definition picture CRUSHES standard quality picture

2. My HD player was on an UNBELIEVABLE sale, going for $99 with a mail in rebate for 5 free movies.  The sale was ESPECIALLY good compared to the cheapest Blu Ray player on the market, which was going for over $500 at the time.

3. HD DVD and Blu Ray have, as far as I can tell, the same excellent picture quality, so why not go with HD DVD for 1/5 the price?

If you take a look at the reasons listed above, you can see that HD DVD was offering a FANTASTIC product for an extremely reasonable price.  However, it appears that they were being mismanaged by a team of single celled organisms with hummingbird-like attention spans.
In the end, HD DVD lost the format war for several compelling reasons:

1. They INSISTED on having HD DVD/DVD combo formats on most discs.  The problem was that the disks cost exactly the same price as Blu Ray, if not more.  WHY THE EFF DO I NEED A REGULAR DVD ON THE REVERSE SIDE?  It’s as if the HD DVD masterminds had NO IDEA that the reason I was buying their format was because I wanted EXCEPTIONAL picture.  If I wanted regular DVD, I would have bought the regular one for $10 cheaper.  If HD DVD had simply cut out the DVD portion of the format, think of how much cost they could have cut.  They could have completely underpriced Blu Ray in the market, ensuring more and more casual fans.

2. Blu Ray had the backing of the Sony PS3 from the start.  The software sales from the PS3 alone were enough to compete with HD DVD.  Sure, HD DVD could be purchased as an “add-on” to the XBOX 360, but it wasn’t included right out of the box.  If HD DVD came with every XBOX 360 from the start, it would have had an ENTIRE YEAR head start against Blu Ray and gotten an HD player into the home of just about every hardcore gamer out there.

3. HD DVD apparently REFUSED to advertise.  I’ve NEVER seen an HD DVD commercial in my life.  If they had taken the time to get the word out about how cheap their players were their market share would have significantly improved.

I guess in the end, I’m stuck with a HD player with some kick-ass performance, which is already obsolete.  In 6 months, I’ll be left with no choice but to switch over to Blu Ray.  I suppose that if nothing else, I still gained 5 free movies, and was able to pick up some great flicks for dirt cheap as the price bottomed out once Blu Ray officially won the format war.  I’ll conclude my mini-HD rant by sharing a story from this past year.


This past Christmas, I got an HD player for my brother Tom, thinking that I was being a great brother and getting him a SWEET present.  Of course, his player came with a rebate as well.  Unknown to either of us when I gave it to him, the format war quickly came to an end.  It came to an end so quickly in fact, that my brother had not yet received his 5 free movies when the announcement was made.  Since they stopped printing the discs (my speculation), they did not send him the movies he selected.  Instead, they sent him 5 discs of their choice; presumably based on what small quantities they still had available in stock.  His guest rant describes his HD experience perfectly.    


Check out Tom's DOMINANT guest rant HERE.

 

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.