LG Drops Plans For Dual-Format HDTV Player

[BJ_M]

Continued turmoil in the production, marketing and distribution of high-definition DVD players appeared evident today as Korea's LG said that it had dropped plans to launch a dual-format DVD player that would be compatible with both Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD-DVD discs.
The announcement was confusing, given the fact that LG had announced last March that it had dropped plans to produce a Blu-ray-only player.
However, at an electronics conference in New York on Monday, Bob Perry, VP of LG sales, said: "LG remains part of the Blu-ray camp and will make a product announcement later in the year."


In other words, LG is going to blow the direction of what sells the most ....

[satviewer2000]

With the absurd prices of HDTV-DVD players, the incompatible formats, the lack of software, the marginal improvement in quality (to the casual viewer) and the lack of component output (as most HDTV owners own sets which only have component hi-def inputs), I think that both formats will very likely die a slow death much like the Laserdisc system.

I would call myself an "avid" home theatre user, and I have absolutely no plans to buy either format player now or in the near future.

[waheed]

...slow death like DVD Audio and SACD.

[ROF]

I think that both formats will very likely die a slow death much like the Laserdisc system.

Highly unlikely but it is comforting to see all this turmoil is not effecting me. At this point I enjoy my current DVD. I have HD content and can definitely see the difference it makes in the video realm but these next generation blu-ray discs are not going to be about video, just as DVD to me is mostly not about video. To me it is about storage space. More space the merrier. I wish these two camps could work out a compromise but like DVD before it, there will be a format war for several years. Doomsayers are not Soothsayers.

[Cornucopia]

Slow death? Laserdisc? DVD-Audio? SACD?

Laserdisc had a ~22 year lifespan (1978-2000), which is better than other formats considered successful in their time (e.g. 8-track).
and IIRC, DVDA & SACD are still growing in sales at this time.

There's "successful" and "SUCCESSFUL" (the latter being wildly successful). HD/BD will probably be the former even if not the latter, just because it is a benefit for data storage (like ROF said). Success in niche markets like audiophiles (DVDA & SACD) is still success, but it's also the former, not the latter.

Sure, the companies putting this out expect a rediculous ROI in a short period of time, and they will probably be disappointed (although I could have told them that their expectations were unreasonable), and they may consider these formats "unsuccessful" as a business strategy, but that doesn't really mean that with consumers in the long run.

Getting back ONTOPIC, I predict they'll do an about-face in a couple of weeks/months/years.

Scott

[lenti_75]

there will be a HD player and burner...as about blue ray an hddvd success....who knows, will see.

maybe 1yr from now, another company will release HD player and burner on holographic discs...

[CrayonEater]

Exactly BD and HD are already almost obsolete, especially given the leap in capacity HVD and other holo media will bring.

[DJRumpy]

There are already burners for these. My laptop came with one from the factory. The formats are hardly obsolete since they are brand new. It takes years to define standards let alone market these things. This is not the same as hooking up a storage device to your PC. There are DRM issues that would have to be addressed which would take an excessive amount of time, licensing, legal, and technical issues interfacing with HD TV sets, etc.

HD-DVD and Blue-Ray will be around for many years to come, just as DVD will be. Look at VHS. You can still find those, and they don't come close to comparing to DVD yet they linger on. By the time a new format comes out and the capacity is needed (currently it's not needed for for video media..they don't fill out these disks now as it is), then a higher capacity format makes sense. Right now it doesn't as you can fit 9 hours of HD video on a 50 GB disk.

[ozymango]

Laserdisc had a ~22 year lifespan (1978-2000), which is better than other formats considered successful in their time (e.g. 8-track).
and IIRC, DVDA & SACD are still growing in sales at this time.

Yeah, but there's death and there's death --if there are still mechanical means to "play" a certain kind of media, then there'll really never be a "death" of that media, just a very small user base. One of the things about electronic recordings is that the playback device is a huge part of the media itself, and so it can have a worse death than some other forms of playback. If that makes sense.

Put another way: The "8-track" tape is the same physical medium as the "cart" they used to use in radio stations, so there were (and still are) a lot of devices out there that could play back a tape, and even now it's not too difficult to find an old 8-track tape player because they're fairly simple (mechanically) and extracting the signal from the tape is pretty simple (mechanically). So though the 8-track is dead, it still lives on, in very small "cult" groups.

For a while after CDs came out there was a huge cry that "vinyl" would be killed off, but we know that LPs can never be killed off because it's pretty simple to extract a useful signal from an LP and that alone makes it a very good long-term archival medium, relatively speaking.

8mm and S8mm movie film is "dead," it's extremely difficult to even find anymore, but it'll never truly die as you can still play back 8mm and S8mm movies pretty easily, you just need a light bulb.

But as our recording/playback devices become more complex, death becomes for "final" for some things than other. Like 8 1/2" floppies. Or maybe even 5 1/4 inch floppies (though I've got a drive in my computer, for work stuff). The technology needed to "play" the information on some newer storage mediums ... heck, *all* new storage mediums ... is such that it's not like the old days when you could pull open even a TV set and figure out which tubes were burned out, what circuits were open, and then figure out a way to fix it.

[DJRumpy]

Exactly. These two new formats are not dead. They are not hard to find, and the players are still being actively produced. This technology is brand new. It's laughable to call it dead due to wishful thinking on someone's part for a technology that isn't available yet. It won't be dead until it's dead.

I still fail to understand why we have these arguments every time a new technology is released, or a new technology is even discussed. Suddenly anything currently on the market is suddenly 'dead'. The market simply doesn't move that fast. The very people who are complaining that they wont' adopt such and such technology are the very cause of the slow market. They ensure these things take years to go through a full life cycle. Everyone isn't going to simply stop buying HD-DVD, Blue-Ray, DVD, or even VHS simply because holographic technology is being developed. It certainly doesn't make these existing technologies dead.

If that were the case, we'd all be driving around in electric and hydrogen powered cars

[MJA]

The LG player failed because of the outrages $1200 price tag .you can buy a PS3,and a 360+ a cheap Toshiba HD player for $1200

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp;jsessionid=AVZ3SBTYOGC01KC4D3EVAFY?skuId=82033...=1165610378688

[DJRumpy]

I would expect the first players to be expensive. The price will drop on them just as it does on all the others.

They haven't released any pricing on the new dual format players that I can see.

[j1d10t]

because of the outrages $1200 price tag .

Depends on where you look:
http://www.amazon.com/LG-BH100-High-definition-Blu-ray-player/dp/B000QDDZPI/ref=pd_bbs...4780807&sr=8-2

[DJRumpy]

Hm..not bad considering it's one of the first. Still a bit pricey for me. I'd be interested once the price was closer to the $400 range.

[j1d10t]

I'd be interested once the price was closer to the $400 range.

Yeah. The technology is only going to get better and cheaper.

[DJRumpy]

I was surprised my laptop came with a BR burner. I hadn't even noticed it in the specs. I thought it was a reader. Of course I have no reason to back up anything since I have a USB drive I use for that, but still handy for a hard copy I suppose.

I should look up the specs for the PS3 to see if it supports DivX/XviD on Blue-Ray disks.

[MJA]

blank media for both are expansive

[Nelson37]

The first CD-Audio player I saw was $899.00, and nobody had thought of burning yet.

I really ought to go into the "pie in the sky" business as a number of people seem to be buying it.

There is a tremendous difference between "a new technology under development", which is an idea with no hardware yet present, a "technology demonstrator", which is a new idea with some actual working hardware, but no consumer product, and a "new product", which is something which consumers may, or may not, actually buy. When enough people actually buy it that other companies start making one, and support services become widely available, then and only then do you have a viable product.

Everything except the last category is what used to be described as BullShit. Absolutely Meaningless. The atomic-powered car is not something anybody in their right mind would be putting off a purchase waiting for.

DVD itself has only recently reached the final phase. BluRay and HD-DVD are not there yet, but close. It is not likely anything else will reach the consumer product stage within the next 18 months or so, and demand is increasing. One of these, possibly both but not likely, will emerge soon as the winner. Unfortunately, burners and their functionality will probably not drive this.

[Cornucopia]

I liked what ozymango said about "death vs. death", although in the instance of the 8 track tape, while the hardware may be very similar, the record/play magnetic tape heads are different. In studio players, it's 2track only. There will be similar problems to the use of consumer reel-to-reels with pro reel-to-reel equipment (or vice-versa), where one can only playback a track that is a mix of 2 (or more) tracks that simultaneously move past a larger trackhead's area (one of them possibly be in reverse), or the reverse, where a track doesn't get the full signal and so one gets a signal that has incorrect frequency response, etc.

There are "Blockbuster" product lives, and there are Modest product lives, and there are DOA product lives (and a few more in-between). SACD and DVD-Audio are obviously not "Blockbuster" level, but are they completely DOA? I don't think so (maybe 1/2 way between DOA and Modest).

Same with Blu-Ray & HD-DVD. These might turn out to really only appeal to "videophiles" as SACD/DVD-Audio only appeals to "audiophiles". This niche type of product automatically won't fall into the "Blockbuster" type (which requires total, MASS need and acceptance). But whether it is Modest or DOA (or something in-between) has yet to be determined--too early.

Scott

[Leoslocks]

HD DVD outpacing next-gen formats in sales growth

overall HD DVD hardware sales were up 37 percent from Q1 to Q2 2007, ... overall Blu-ray hardware sales saw a 27 percent decline from Q1 to Q2

Recent studies[1] have shown most consumers are basing their purchasing decisions on pricing. (No shock here)

"With the total number of titles available for each format differing by only 20-30 titles at this time, the real-world gap in content between the two formats is in actuality not as large as many would perceive," said Paul Erickson

Two differences, Price and Storage Capacity. I feel that price will drive the adoption of HD by enough people to keep it competative. Watching a standard DVD on a HD TV is more than acceptable at this point in time. Still, watching a demo in the store is quite impresive. I may have paid nearly $1000 for the first SVHS deck that came out but I doubt I will spend much over $200 for either an HD or BR player.

[DJRumpy]

You should note those numbers are promotional material from the "North American HD DVD Promotional Group" and you can't see the actual numbers that they based their reports on. It appears to be for paying customers only.

Both camps have a horrible habit of taking valid numbers and slanting them. For all we know these numbers could be the sales figures from Slovakia. HD-DVD also has the bad habbit of excluding PS-3 players. Faced with the choice of buying a $1000 dollar player or a $500 dollar player, price won out with many a consumer wanting Blue-Ray. Promotional material is meaningless. I would trust only independent figures that are not being pushed out by either group. Thats not to say that the Nielson ratings aren't independent, but rather the group presenting the numbers is probably cherry picking.

[Ai Haibara]

HD-DVD also has the bad habbit of excluding PS-3 players.

I thought they excluded PS3s because they weren't stand-alone set-top players, and there wasn't a good way to tell if anyone who bought one was just using it for Blu-Ray videos alone (or if they were using it for BR playing at all)? I'm not sure, but I think the game systems that could play DVDs weren't counted in similar surveys in the past.

Then again, I think I remember seeing that the HD-DVD add-on for the X-Box 360 wasn't really counted, either (even though (AFAIK) playing movies is about all you can do with it), but I'm not sure. As far as I saw, the survey was just focusing on stand-alone set-top players, anyway.

[DJRumpy]

Can you post a link with the numbers in question? It's not as easy as you might think to find non-partial reports with real numbers

http://www.xbox365.com/news.cgi?id=GGLuiLuLLG06251036

The HD DVD Group announced in April that it had sold over 100,000 players in the U.S. in its first year of availability. The numbers only represented standalone players, and did not include sales of HD DVD PC drives or the Xbox 360 HD DVD player.

A Microsoft rep told CNET UK that 155,000 Xbox 360 HD DVD add-ons have been sold in the U.S., making it the “biggest-selling accessory” ever sold for the console. Each HD DVD drive retails for around $200.

Even with the combination of standalone HD DVD players and the Xbox 360 add-on, the overall number of HD DVD-capable players is less than the total number of Blu-ray playing machines. According to CNET, an average of one disc per Blu-ray machine is sold, compared to four discs per HD DVD machine. Nevertheless, overall disc sales for 2007 are still in favor of Blu-ray.

[Ai Haibara]

Me? Probably not. I was just commenting based on observations.

But I wouldn't be surprised if it were rather difficult to get an impartial, third-party survey or accounting - given how guarded everything seems to be, the amount of money going into this from either side, and fanboy-ish behavior that even seems to appear at all levels. A third-party opinion might also be quickly 'buried' under all the format debating that's currently going on.

[DJRumpy]

I'm hoping it's already at an end. The dual-format players announced this month by just about every major electronics company should put an end to the debate. I made my choice after reading the specs for both last year. This just means the prices will start coming down (and not a moment too soon).

Although I like the PS3 and it's capabilities, I miss having a dedicated stand-alone player that I can program my remote for...lol

[Leoslocks]

You should note those numbers are promotional material from the "North American HD DVD Promotional Group" and you can't see the actual numbers that they based their reports on. It appears to be for paying customers only.

Drawn from the NPD Reports and needing to pay for the information illustrates an independant company compiling the results. Still, it is little more than marketing. Statistics are nothing more than data gathered to promote your point of view. Get the price right and I will get a multi player.

It took LG almost a year to flip flop on producing a multi player.

LG Unveils Second-Generation Super Multi Blue Drives for Computers. Not a stand alone player but a move in the right direction.

[DJRumpy]

That wasn't my point. It's the fact that the company paying for the results can then cherry pick what they produce for public consumption. While technically accurate, the results rarely show the larger picture. Both sides are guilty of this. I tend to believe the news from the XBox site simply because it refers to a third party that I would trust, and the numbers themselves don't necessarily reflect well on HD-DVD sales even though the site is an XBox specific site.