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As the pricing of HD DVD players continue to fall, the Blu-ray Disc Association has plans to try luring in extra customers by bundling five free Blu-ray disc movies with the sale of each Blu-ray disc player or PlayStation 3 console in the 3rd quarter. The bundled movies are worth between US$100 and US$150 according to Taiwanese industry sources. The sales promotion will take place at the BD Association’s anniversary celebration of launching the first Blu-ray disc products within the US. Its members and six other leading Hollywood movie studios will sponsor the event.
At present, Toshiba's entry-level DVD player starts at US$299 and an entry level Blu-ray disc player or PS3 starts at around US$500, so the Blu-ray player's bundled free movies will help offset some of the price difference. The number of titles available in both formats continues to grow, with the number of Blu-ray and HD DVD titles growing from 220 and 230 in January 2007 to 410 and 366 at present respectively.
Despite there being a handful of HD DVD and Blu-ray titles in Amazon's Top 100 selling DVD list just a few weeks ago, the only HD title in there at this time of writing is the BBC's Planet Earth series, with the HD DVD version still ranking at 12 and the Blu-ray version ranking a little lower at 16 at this time of writing. From what I can see, I'm sure many consumers who see a $200 difference between the two players would still likely go for the cheaper player, especially if they make an assumption that the higher Blu-ray player price is the catch of getting the free movies. It is also unclear if the five bundled movies are Blu-ray disc movie vouchers or 5 preselected movie titles physically bundled with the player.
Further info can be read in this source DigiTimes report.
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