In the news today, as part of its Black Friday promotion, Wal-Mart announced that it is selling a Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD player today for $98.97. The price point represents a dramatic new low for Toshiba’s entry-level model, which was recently reduced to under $200 at Amazon.com, Circuit City and Costco. It makes us ponder where all of this is heading.

John DiLoreto
Analyst and Editor for
Insight Media

Granted, the $99 price is only temporary and the HD-A2 is a closeout being replaced by the more fully featured HD-A3. However, it indicates that HD players are rapidly heading to the commodity status that standard DVD players have achieved for some time.

According to current statistics offered by the MPAA, DVD players have penetrated 86% of the 111M TV households in the US - and with good reason. The average price of the 20M DVD players sold last year was $53! Yes, $53.

Now combine that with another interesting statistic. There were 1.3B DVDs sold in the US last year. That’s BILLION, roughly 12 for each household. Whether HD or SD, soon the American public will be awash in DVDs scattered throughout the house, in their cars and in their laptop bags.

What’s needed here is a better way of organizing and accessing this content. However, the DVD CCA licensing authority has been standing in the way. It remains difficult and illegal to rip your DVDs to your PC’s hard drive, even though the cost of HDD mass storage continues its historical falling trend.

Others have pointed to Internet video (Joost, YouTube, Hulu) as an alternate source for ubiquitous video entertainment. However, many of the desired viewing devices can’t access the Internet. Neither do these outlets come close to offering the 75K DVD titles that are available today. Also, what about the legacy content of DVDs we already own?

Perhaps, in some way recognizing the threat to this aging medium (only 20M DVD players were sold this year in the US), last month the DVD CCA announced an agreement in principal to allow its CSS copy protection to be bundled with the disk image itself. This means that with the right license, DVDs can be downloaded intact. They aren’t about to license common PC owners yet, and litigation with video server company Kaleidescape continues. So, the problem hasn’t been completely solved.

And as far as hi-def discs go, managed copies remain in an unresolved status.

So will the lowly DVD player evolve into something more useful? Will we see them come with terabyte storage and an Ethernet port, a direction in which Pioneer has dabbled?

Ironically, the same Hollywood elite who support such stringent DVD licensing terms are able to overcome this problem today with a $50,000 server. As reported Monday in Variety, Hollywood mogul Brett Ratner calls his Kaleidescape media server "the coolest thing in the world that I own … I have my entire movie library on it and on every TV in my house, so I can play any film anytime." He reportedly has more than 10,000 DVDs in his collection.

What about the rest of us? It shouldn’t take a 5-figure device to do that.

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