thomas fitzgerald.net

Despite Toshiba’s attempt to flood the market with cheap high-def players and buy off movie studios, the consumer still seems to prefer the blu-ray format according to the latest Nielson VideoScan numbers latest Nielson VideoScan numbers which show a 71% to 29% split in favour of blu-ray.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. There is no way Toshiba is going to win this war on its own. They may be selling more standalone players, but by selling them off at $100 the people most likely to buy them are those who think they’re getting a good sd dvd player for a bargain. If you think about it, the average consumer who buys in that price range, doesn’t have a HDTV, doesn’t care about HDTV or even know what HD is, so by focusing all your marketing efforts on that segment of the market you avoid the actual target consumer for such devices. It’s completely crazy. I would be willing to bet that 40 - 50% of people who have bought a HD-DVD player bought it to primarily play SD-DVD’s.

The people mainly interested in high-def content are home cinema enthusiasts, many of whom have strong brand loyalty to their existing electronics providers such as Pioneer and Sony, all of which are in the Blu-Ray camp. Toshiba has never been associated with high end quality home entertainment equipment, and as long as they continue to push into the lower end of the market they never will.

You know a format is on the losing path when they have to resort to tactics like flooding the market, pretending that game consoles don’t matter and paying off studios for exclusivity.