Why Blu-ray will win - by Ben Drawbaugh

[Shadowself]

Originally Posted by hmurchison

Because some of us realize that there "will" be other platform vendors. Liteon is making recorders. Acer is shipping laptops with the HD DVD player and recordable media is already available in SL and SL versions. The HD DVD Euro launch is coming and there will be new hardware there. All is well and I'm excited. I'm excited about Blu-Ray as well and I'd like to see more agressive pricing on 2nd generation hardware but long gone are the days where I thought Blu-Ray would run roughshod over HD DVD. They have fumbled enough to give HD DVD every advantage of playing for the win.

There have been no such announcements of these companies actually shipping stand alone HD DVD players manufactured by them. So far there is only one HD DVD player manufacturer announced. From announcement to acutal, full production shipping product is typically several months (unless they are only going to rebrand Toshiba's product) -- sometimes it is a year or more. If a second manufacturer does not ship a player before a year from now it will be a non issue.

The way I look at it... a year from now if a consumer walks into a CE store and looks at six to ten different brands on the shelf with some of those brands having two or three models -- all Blu-ray ---- then looks at the opposing shelf with one or two brands (and both obviously the same with just different logos).... which will s/he tend to look at more seriously? I'm betting he will more seriously look at the bank of several different players (thinking "These are the 'standard' players.") rather than look at the couple odd balls (thinking "These are the niche/oddities."). It's no different than the average person going into CompUSA and looking at the Mac versus the Windows machines. The average consumer is going to walk out with a Windows machine -- even if it is sometimes more expensive than a Mac.