Sony Launched New Cutesy Promotion Website
Posted by Dave Cowl
closeAuthor: Dave Cowl
Name: Dave Cowl
Email: dave@formatwarcentral.com
Site: http://www.blu-raystats.com
About: Originally from New Zealand, Dave now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a doctorate in Electrical Engineering, Dave's day job
involves developing high resolution LCoS projectors.
Dave also has a strong interest in cinema and film making, and has
always been an early adopter - he still uses his Sony DVP-S7000 DVD
Player and also owns first generation Blu-ray, HD DVD and DTheater
D-VHS equipment.
Dave has been following the HD Disc format war since the beginning,
which resulted in the Blu-ray Statistics and HD DVD Statistics
websites, designed to track the studio progress with features as they
have released HD media product.See Authors Posts (349) on September 6, 2007
Filed Under: Blu-ray
The marketing department has been working overtime at Sony and come up with a new website I can only describe as ‘cutesy’. The site is happyhdtv.com and claims that you need Blu-ray to make your HDTV happy (which assumes you HDTV has feelings?). Web advertisements linking to the site are popping up in all the usual places. Personally I wonder if this kind of extremely ‘low tech’ advertising in a ‘high tech’ space like the internet really makes much if any difference. It will be interesting to see if there is an equivalent print campaign.
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Sony seriously needs to give up on this whole movie thing on blu-ray. They don’t have to worry about becoming the next Beta max because at least their media will still be used as storage for computers and source of Ps3 games, but come on, know when to let it go when your time is up, enough is enough, HD DVD is coming back for the win like Rocky Balboa!
With the Paramount news fresh, no Blu-ray releases, two hot ‘day and date’ HD DVD releases and three catalogue releases the sales figures were still in Blu-ray’s favour according to Videoscan data. To add insult, neither of the day and date titles managed to outsell 300 in its 4th week on Blu-ray.
It seems to me that this come back for the win you speak of is still an uphill battle for HD DVD.
Unfortunately for Sony, the average person doesn’t know what Blu-ray or HD-DVD is. HD-DVD at least has a name that is self-explanatory. Toss in the fact that they’ll be able to pick up an HD-DVD player for $175 or less and get at least 5 free movies (Bourne and 300 come free in the box with the new Toshiba players) and it’s gonna be a red hot holiday season.
@Dave
I don’t doubt the fact that “300″ is selling well on Blu-ray, mainly the PS3 (since those severely outnumber Blu-ray standalone players). If there were one film that they should be able to sell 1:1 it should be “300″ because it fits perfectly with their target demographic of 15-30.
With that being said it’s no surprise that “300″ is the number one title for Blu-ray. However, one high selling title is not grounds for a win in the format war, it is more of a battle, but even then the amount of discs sold will certainly be in flux for some time due to the fact that there are so many people that have yet to buy into the war. Once a format manages to penetrate the mass market, all of this bickering over “top selling” titles will come to a close and a clear winner will be determined.
I don’t believe that the average consumer will be willing to support both formats. It is also my belief that they would sooner refuse to invest in either than they would if both formats were going to live on together. The reason it seems unlikely is pricing of the hardware. Conceptually, the neutral player is a safe bet, but with the entry price being so high, which is unlikely to drop below $300 anytime soon, hedging your bets will be an after thought, and consumers will look to the players that are “fully featured” between $100-200.
The important thing to remember is that people like us, the early adopters, are only a minuscule percentage of the intended market for these technologies. It wasn’t long ago that HD disc sales (hd dvd and blu-ray combined) surpassed VHS sales. This was an incredibly sobering bit of news for me, as I’m sure it was for anyone who read the same article.
I suppose that what I’m getting at is that we’ve still got a long way to go.
Most weeks the top 10 HD Media is 2 HD DVDs and 8 Blu-ray discs, usually including titles like Pirates of the Caribbean, Planet Earth and Casino Royale and more recently the likes of Wild Hogs and 300. It is not a one title thing.
This week, the best HD DVD has seen in a while, there were 4 HD DVDs in the top 10.
I had never expected HD Media to grow as fast as DVD, and to be honest I am surprised at how fast it has grown.
Indeed there is still a long way to go.
You’re right, Blu-ray has been having a nice run at the HD top ten for awhile, but I suppose my point was that it’s easy to get drunk off of those results, but not only are they constantly in flux, but when you only compare HD media, the ranking seems to be much higher than it truly is, with a lot of discs that are below the top 100 in DVD sales.
We’re definitely making progress, and it’s great to see both sharing a lot of success in the upper tiers of the Amazon sales ranks, but I just try to visit their site, and now the rankings on HDD, every now and then.
Anymore than that is detrimental, in my opinion anyway.
That’s mainly what I was trying to say.
ps. Not to shit in your cereal or anything, Dave, but didn’t you say that the fact that the A2 was the number one selling electronic device on Amazon, wasn’t that big of a deal, and yet you view these HD disc sales in the top ten as a huge accomplishment?
So, is amazon significant or not?
I wasn\’t talking about the Amazon Top 10, I was talking about the weekl Videoscan First Alert data.
As far as Amazon goes, I would imagine that they sell a lot more media than hardware relative to B&M, and they are included in the Videoscan count. The Amazon rankings do not always correlate well with Videoscan.
Videoscan and NPD are the most relevant and credible data available for software and hardware respectively.
For the Year to Date sales to August 5, HD DVD holds only 4 of the top 20 titles. They are 300, The Departed, Planet Earth and Batman Begins. BD holds the other 16 top 20 spots.
None of the top 20 are Universal titles. Sony has 4, Disney has 5. Lionsgate even has one as does Fox. Warner is the clear leader with 4 HD DVD titles and 5 Blu-ray titles – so they make up almost half of the top 20 titles.
Haha, I was assuming you were talking about Amazon. That’s my fault.
There is no doubt that Warner is killing it right now. They have some of the most successful films/franchises in recent memory, with just about every studio itching to catch up, and they stand to profit quite a bit as long as they remain neutral during these relatively early days in the format war.
I think that Warner is the biggest player right now. This can certainly change in the future, dependent upon future releases, and whether or not some incredible must-own catalog titles are released exclusively on either format. As for now though, I think that Warner’s neutral stance is a definite sign that there is still no “winner”, despite what anyone says, and that the end of the war is not yet in sight. I also think that if Warner had perceived a definite benefit to going exclusive they would have, but at this time, for their business model, it doesn’t make sense just yet.
On a different note, do you know when the figures for the month of August will be released? Also, where do you look for these figures?
The YTD sales figures don\’t show up very often, so it was great to get the Aug 5 numbers. They tend to show up in the Home Media Magazine when they do. They give weekly sales ratios.
With respect to studios I think that Disney is a key player especially with the Pixar films which are very popular. I don\’t really see any other studio as crucial though Warner is obviously strong – mostly as a result of releasing on both formats. For BD only, Sony and Disney tie Warner with 5 in the top 20 BDs each – Fox even has 3
and Lionsgate 2.
It is really interesting that Paramount/Dreamworks and Universal both have nothing in the top 20 YTD (both formats) at Aug 5. Naturally this should change going forward for Dreamworks at least.
Warner has the top 5 HD DVDs. The top Universal title is Smokin Aces. Top Paramount is Babel. It is a strange world!
But it goes to show that Day and Date releases are important.
Oh, Disney is huge. No doubting that. I’m still confused by their answer to whether or not they received financial incentives to go Blu. Not saying they’re contemplating a shift, but it does seem strange.
Another studio that has yet to play a role in the war is New Line, and of course everyone is holding their breath waiting for the Lord of the Rings HD set, on both Blu-ray and HD DVD. They have other titles in their catalog, but surely this is the most significant and will undoubtedly be their best selling title, and perhaps one of the best selling titles on both Blu-ray and HD DVD whenever it ends up dropping.
It’s just interesting to see that with some studios, if they were to release a single title they would easily join the ranks of the top 10 or even top 5 titles.
Did you ever get a chance to see some of the screen grabs from the HD DVD version of Return of the King? I don’t have a link, but I remember the site was in spanish, though I’m not sure where the article originated from. I wish I still had that link. I doubt it’s still up though, but the stills looked damn fine. Can’t wait for those!
I think they didn’t want to ‘reveal’ that this tour of theirs is not on their dollar or at least partly. It was also interesting to me that the Paramount guy at the HD DVD presentation didn’t take questions at all
I am sure that in all reality most if not all studios have received help with costs and/or free technical support in the new technologies.
Indeed all of these studios have ‘big guns’ that would sell a lot of copies. A lot of ‘chicken and egg’ or ‘catch 22′ going on with titles and hardware.
New Line would seem to be following Warner with their neutral stance based on what we see at Warner online.
For me there are really three titles that I need in HD to justify my purchase, and those are: Terminator 2, The Godfather, and Jurassic Park.
There are far too many reasons for me to list why those are must own movies, but at this time there are only two “up in the air” at the moment. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for The Godfather Trilogy release in ‘08, along with Jurassic Park.
I’m assuming that The Godfather will be exclusive to HD DVD, but I’m still biting my nails over the whole Spielberg situation, as we might not see all of his classic titles until one format prevails.
On a different note, here is the link to the LOTR screen shots. The website is blocked at my work, so I can’t confirm whether or not the pictures are still up.
http://www.zonadvd.com/modules.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=608&page=7