Originally posted by: Number20
The issue is that most people still have old TVs, and aren't really in the market for something new. They are waiting around for "prices to drop" and aren't wanting to upgrade right now. Agreed, retailers are pushing HDTVs hard, but if you look at sales figures vs. predicted sales for HDTVs, they have consistently been very dissapointing for retailers. One stat I heard is that at current sales, HDTVs won't acheive 60% of the market for 15-30 years. If most people are that slow to adopt HDTV, I don't see any bigger hurry to adopt high-def DVDs. Especially when you are dealing with people who just stopped buying VHS about 5 years ago or so. They just upgraded, so why do they need to again? And the whole "format war" scares people off quickly. They remember they or someone they know got burned by buying a betamax, and they don't want to go through that again.
The issue is that most people still have old TVs, and aren't really in the market for something new. They are waiting around for "prices to drop" and aren't wanting to upgrade right now. Agreed, retailers are pushing HDTVs hard, but if you look at sales figures vs. predicted sales for HDTVs, they have consistently been very dissapointing for retailers. One stat I heard is that at current sales, HDTVs won't acheive 60% of the market for 15-30 years. If most people are that slow to adopt HDTV, I don't see any bigger hurry to adopt high-def DVDs. Especially when you are dealing with people who just stopped buying VHS about 5 years ago or so. They just upgraded, so why do they need to again? And the whole "format war" scares people off quickly. They remember they or someone they know got burned by buying a betamax, and they don't want to go through that again.
Best Buy recently announced that profits are up 52% for the quarter. This is huge and wasn't expected. It's also based on big ticket sales like HDTVs and DVD players (probably hi-def of both formats and standard def). The point, HDTVs have been selling like hotcakes for the past two years, but especially this year. More and more people do have HDTVs and are getting rid of their old sets (or their old sets are breaking).
As for people "not feeling the need" for hi-def, that pretty much goes against everything I've been reading. Everything I've been reading, and this is based on industry people talking to actual consumers and not just "well, this is what I think is going on", says that people aren't buying into either format because they don't want to end up with a dead format. That is the single overriding concern of most consumers. Those same people are also not buying regular DVDs much anymore because they don't want to have to rebuy everything once the format war is over.
Consumers would love nothing more than to buy hi-def DVDs to enjoy on their new HD sets. The problem is that there isn't one format and it doesn't look like there's going to be a single format for quite some time. This entire "format war" is either going to relegate both formats to a niche market or people will be forced to buy two players if they want to enjoy movies from all studios, especially since Disney is exclusive to Bluray.
5 years is a pretty long time. Most of those people have been purchasing DVDs since then, but they've just recently bought upgraded TVs. Now they're seeing how crappy their DVDs look on a bigger screen. I know exactly how they feel too. I'd love to get a hi-def player, but there's no way in hell I'm doing it until there's a cheap dual format player or a single format.