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What a strange day
November 2, 2007
As you might know I run one of the Internet’s largest satellite television discussion forums. On any normal day folks will be flooding the forums asking satellite related questions such as where can I find the best deal on new satellite service, or when will (insert channel name here) HD be coming to (insert satellite company name here)?
But that didn’t happen today. Instead today’s big topic of discussions online was “High Definition” but it was not HD from any satellite service instead it was the topic of HD DVD.
It seems as though for one-day people forgot all about all the great HD channels satellite offers and instead wanted to talk about the HD wars. Not the war between Dish Network or DirecTV, but the war between HDDVD and Blu-ray technologies.
It seems that today in this war of formats took a sharp turn in favor of the HDDVD camp. In a surprise sneak attack overnight many retailers dropped the price of the Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player that was selling for a MSRP of $299 to a price of $100 or below. Leading this charge with the big box king, Wal-Mart who offered the player for only $98.87. Others such as Best Buy and Crutchfield quickly dropped their pricing to fall in line with Wal-Mart’s special price.
It will be interesting to see what the Blu-ray camp does to combat this attack. A quick search of Froogle.COM finds the lowest priced non-refurbished Blu-ray players starting at around $375.
A number of industry reporters have stated that the first format to reach a sub $200 price mark would win the HD war, but I don’t think anyone saw sub $100 prices coming.
Many of the folks online including some of the more hard-core Blu-ray supporters could not pass up these great deals. And it is because of these deals that everyone forgot about satellite for a day.
Hopefully by Monday the buzz will have faded and we can be back talking about the HD offerings from DirecTV and Dish Network. But till then I got to get home and hook up this new HD DVD player I picked up this morning.
Yup the bug got me too.
See you next week, and don’t forget to set your clocks back on Saturday night when you go to bed.
Posted by Scott Greczkowski on November 2, 2007 | Comments (3)
