Sony CEO Says $299 Blu-ray Player Is Coming This Year

[ethanhawke]

Just thought of letting you all know!!!

Blue-ray may have won the format fight against HD DVD, but prices for Blu-ray players won't be dropping through the floor. Instead, they will sink slowly and steadily, said Sony Electronics CEO Stan Glascow Wednesday. Prices will drop to $299 this year from $399 and up and reach as low as $200 next year, Glasgow said at a roundtable event in New York, according to Gizmodo.
"I don't think $200 is going to happen this year. Next year $200 could happen. We'll be at a $300 rate this year. $299 will happen this year," Glascow said, Gizmodo reported.

Glascow also said he doesn't expect cheap Chinese-made players to step in and undercut prices because the Blu-ray Association, which oversees the Blu-ray standard, has not given licenses to any Chiense manufacturers. "Will there be Chinese players? Yes. (But) We don't need to drive that and hand the technology over" any time soon, Glasgow said at the roundtable, according to the New York Times.

Sony's Playstation 3, whose shift to Blu-ray played such an important role in the Blu-ray victory, will continue to see changes, he said. Asked if there will be another PlayStation with Blu-ray built-in, Glasgow said, "there's going to be continual evolvement in the PlayStation line," Gizmodo reported.

Movie downloads, which garner a lot of buzz, should not undercut Blu-ray, Glascow added. While movies still take hours to download, discs are still popular.

"People like owning packaged media," he said, according to the New York Times. "Downloading will build over time, but it could take ten years for significant penetration."

http://www.crn.com/hardware/206901990