Wal-Mart Goes Blu-Ray!
One by one, retailers have been ditching the HD-DVD format in favor of Blu-Ray. Now Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has decided to go Blu-Ray exclusive. This comes just days after Netflix announced their Blu-Ray exclusivity.
In a statement from the official Wal-Mart blog, Check Out,
"by June Wal-Mart will only be carrying Blu-ray movies and hardware machines, and of course standard def movies, DVD players, and up convert players. Not sure of the short term pricing plans, but history tells us that as more people move to a new technology prices typically go down."
So does this mean we will be seeing $150 Blu-Ray players in a year? Probably not, but one can dream. Wal-Mart going Blu-Ray can guarantee the slow death of the HD-DVD format. If you can listen closely you can hear the collective death rattle. /cough... wheeze
Thanks Saeton for the tip! He's on the PSN, btw.
World's largest retailer, Wal-Mart, going Blu-ray [PS3 Fanboy]
Toots
Posted to Movies-DVDs, Video Games on 15 February 2008
· Comments (2)
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Sorry to see HD DVD go. I liked the format and do not plan to pick up Bluray anytime soon. To be honest I have found myself wanting to own movies less than less and would rather have a good subscription model based VOD service maybe like the one hinted in the Netflix survey.
Just another reason to hate my employer even moreso. Heh, oh well. The disks I own aren't exactly going to just burst into flame the moment the format is killed off. In the end, there will be plenty of cheap HD disks I can pick up.
Still, it does bring back the sting I felt as a Dreamcast owner when the system was canned. Despite the smaller storage capacity, I loved that it was region free (hardcore movie buff and import freak) less DRM (hate it!) and that it had it's specs in order out the gate (HDi, downloadable content)
I'll probably get slaughtered for the Dreamcast comparison, but a lot of the things that system could do such as online gaming and downloadable content seemed ahead of it's time. Fast forward to now it's pretty much standard for these new systems.
I just find it embarassing that a lot of the features HD-DVD had such as picture in picture and downloadable extras, things that are available now on HD-DVD, will take new standalones and these "profiles" just to emulate. Detractors tend to say these features don't matter and aren't strong selling points, but it seems always later down the road when they catch on, they are later hyped up as revolutionary... on the winning format of course.