Starting today Sony will offer 5 free Blu-ray discs with the purchase of any Blu-ray Disc player. This follows months after Toshiba’s 5 free HD DVDs campaign, which started March 1st and goes until the end of this month. Toshiba followed up their aggressive marketing campaign, recently offering $100 off any of it’s HD DVD players. We’ll see if Sony goes down that same path.
Some of the titles in the offer include: Babel, Black Rain, Blazing Saddles, Chicken Little, The Corpse Bride, The Devil’s Rejects, The Guardian, The Italian Job, Kiss of the Dragon, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Species, Stir of Echoes, Underworld: Evolution and several more.
My question is, why not just drop the price of their players? If either camp really wanted to win, they should take a huge loss on production of their high definition hardware. Getting the players into consumer’s homes is the most important thing. Once the player is the home, consumers will want to have movies to play on them.
The Catch 22 would be, how many consumers would actually pay $25 for a hi def movie? Matrix? Yes. Casino Royale? Yes. Blazing Saddles? I don’t think so.
