Walmart Picks HD DVD As The Winner

Walmart is working on getting HD DVD players in its stores this holiday for under $200. This is a huge blow to the Blu-ray camp. In retail, Walmart can make or break most mainstream products. Walmart sells the most DVDs compared to other retailers, so if they pick a format in the next-gen DVD race, it will probably win.

Walmart sells most of its DVDs at or below cost to get people into its stores. However, they see DVD sales shrinking in the near future as standard definition downloads become more and more popular. Walmart needed to get a new hook, so they looked at the next-gen DVD race.

Walmart has to be able to offer a low price on the products it sells, so picking HD DVD was a no brainer. HD DVDs do not require disk manufacturers to invest in new equipment. Current DVD presses can be modified to create HD DVD disks. That creates a huge savings, and Walmart will be able to have lower prices than they would be able to with Blu-ray.

Walmart also needs to be able to sell a (relatively) cheap player, so people can play the media. A sub-$200 HD DVD player is just what they need to kick-start the high-definition DVD era. Blu-ray technology, while impressive, still has complicated parts which are currently too expensive to make a cheap player. Walmart crushed their competitors last holiday by cutting prices on their HD TVs, and now their customers can purchase cheap HD DVD players to use on their TVs.

This is a serious blow to the Blu-ray camp, who has actually seen high sales of its media recently. I doubt Walmart will stop carrying Blu-ray right now, but if the largest retailer is putting its marketing muscle behind your competitor, I would be extremely worried.

Sources

http://www.gadgetell.com/2007/04/50-hd-dvd-players-walmart-goes-low/    Votes: 1

Posted by Tony Kramdale

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