Quote Originally Posted by Groundbeef
It's not really a loss for anyone other than Toshiba.
Exactly!

However, as a consumer, it does cause some future price concerns. I'm not really in the position to be paying the highest amount a studio wants for a movie. I would prefer Toshiba, or some other tech to drive down costs for ME. Removing a 2nd tier competitor isn't "great" except for the company that is now #1 (BR).
Beef, Toshiba is not really a player in disc pricing. They are a hardware company, so there is nothing they can do about the price of software. The bottom line is that it is still really expensive to author high definition disc. It is five times harder to author either formats disc than it was the DVD. BD-j require new tools, programmers have to be paid, and quality control has to be closely maintianed or you have playback issues. As it becomes easier to author, and programmers get better with coding disc, the prices will come down. Keep in mind, the drive for the studios is to get Bluray prices on par with current DVD pricing. That was going to be impossible with a format war still going on.


CD prices took FOREVER to drop, long after economies of scale, experience curve gains in mfg, and other factors should have caused a drop. Only within a few years have prices dipped below ~$15/CD. This is due to competition (MP3, online digital offerings etc). I certainly dont want to be paying $25+ per movie for BR.
I do not know if you know this, but the record companies were fined pretty heavily for collusion in the pricing of CD. They are now being investigated for price collusion for digital downloads. If they could have held prices at $16-18 forever, they would have. Keep in mind, the disc prices of both formats is roughly the same, so no matter which format won, prices would still be $25 at least for the near future. If you have been paying any attention to pricing lately, prices have dropped in some cases $5 a disc.