Toshiba INCREASES HD DVD Marketing

[admin]

Toshiba today announced that it is stepping up its successful marketing campaign for HD DVD as it experienced record-breaking unit sales in the fourth quarter of 2007. Major initiatives, include joint advertising campaigns with studios and drastic price cuts which will begin in mid- January. HD DVD will also tout their focus on quality DVD upconversion and continued customer support. It seems Toshiba isn't ready to give up the ghost just yet.


Discuss "Toshiba INCREASES HD DVD Marketing" here. Read the article.

[GlocksRock]

They just need to give it up already, they are a day late and a dollar short. They knew they were falling behind blu ray overall, especially since HD DVD has fewer studios supporting them so they should have been focusing on these things from the beginning. At this point it would make much more sense to get a cheap A3 or A30 for the discs that are out there, and if you are looking for a great upconverting player. But most people were only considering upconverting players to hold them over till the format war was over, and now that it looks like it is, there really is no good reason to invest in a player for a dying format.

[Buckeye_Nut]

Record sales? I guess it may have been a record quarter for HD-DVD, but Blu-ray still smoked them in the 4th quarter by a 65:35 sales ratio.
(if you exclude the 3:1 ratio in Europe and 9:1 in Japan)

I wouldn't expect them to surrender just yet considering the large investment involved. Regardless of Toshiba's desperate efforts, they'll continue to lose ground to Blu-ray in 2008. It will be interesting to see just how much ground Toshiba loses in the 1st quarter while they still have the benefit of WB releases. It will be downhill after that.....

[alexsound]

Toshiba today announced that it is stepping up its successful marketing campaign for HD DVD as it experienced record-breaking unit sales in the fourth quarter of 2007. Major initiatives, include joint advertising campaigns with studios and drastic price cuts which will begin in mid- January. HD DVD will also tout their focus on quality DVD upconversion and continued customer support. It seems Toshiba isn't ready to give up the ghost just yet.


Discuss "Toshiba INCREASES HD DVD Marketing" here. Read the article.

Stupid move. Not unexpected, but stupid nonetheless. As with the initial reports that WB was going Blu exclusively, Universal and Paramount will more than likely follow suit, even though both of them have "officially" denied that they will be abandoning HD-DVD. This was also the case with WB when rumors started flying around that they will be abandoning HD-DVD and they "officially" denied it and then look what happened with them. Regardless of which side is taken in this format war, it's seems to me that it's fairly obvious who's going to win at this point, regardless of who has the superior format.

[stratman]

They should rethink their marketing strategy to: "We'll include a free player with you first HD DVD movie purchase." Maybe that'll give them a leg up on Bluray.

I say they really should stop throwing away good money after bad (advertising a dead horse) and start production on their version of a Bluray player.

[j_garcia]

It doesn't really matte what they do if the studios drop support. They are going to increase marketing to make sure they get rid of existing players and movies. Of course they are not going to mention that they are on their last leg...

[alexsound]

It doesn't really matte what they do if the studios drop support. They are going to increase marketing to make sure they get rid of existing players and movies. Of course they are not going to mention that they are on their last leg...

Good point. After seeing their sales temporarily go through the roof, hardwarewise, during the holidays, they may have ramped up to much production and are basically have a "fire sale" without actually saying it to get rid of remaining inventory.

[allargon]

It is a bit too little too late unless they convince Paramount or Universal to release a high profile release on HD-DVD (combo or hybrid) only without a DVD version.

Towards the 4th quarter that lead was more like 58:42 if you look at releases available on both formats (e.g. Harry Potter and Blade Runner).

[BMXTRIX]

Toshiba isn't about to drop the ball on a format war that will cost them billions, and I don't think Microsoft will either. Toshiba wants the market confused so that either HD DVD owns a piece of the HD market, or that nobody buys in and keeps buying DVDs which they get significant royalties from annually.

Microsoft wants the market confused long enough for HDDL to become the norm. If people skip the next generation of disc based optical hardware, and instead wait it out a bit longer, then the download market will be ripe for their taking. "Hey look! Don't buy even more hardware, your solution is right there on your desktop and has a name.... Vista!"

No, I think Toshiba is willing to subsidize players, if they aren't already, to try to maintain or increase market share.

It should be noted, that at CES, Toshiba put up a slide that did NOT include PS3 consoles, which indicated that the current stand alone player sales belonged 49% to HD DVD, and 51% to Blu-ray. This is a significant slide, especially from Toshiba, as it indicates that despite rock bottom pricing, they still have not actually managed to outsell the competition even with a huge number of the competitors using PS3 and not stand alone units.

Toshiba isn't stupid, they likely know that HD DVD isn't going to get much further here. But, for them, there must be some other piece that they gain by continuing to fight this format war that they began.

[GlocksRock]

I think Toshiba is trying to hold out as long as possible to help minimize their losses as much as they can.