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Forget Price Cuts, Where Are The Toshiba TV/Player Bundles?
January 23, 2008

It's definitely a fair argument that Warner's decision to go Blu-ray only, touted very publicly during the Jan. 7-10 CES convention, had something to do with BD players routing HD DVD players for the week ending Jan. 12.  But in talking to sources, there's also a contention that these 'buy a high-def TV, get a free BD player' deals are also working to drive business in Blu-ray's favor. In circular after circular over the past few weeks, there are free Sharp, Sony and Panasonic players bundled with same branded high-def TV sets. Sure, you need to shell out $1500 to $2000, a lot more than just $399-$499 for a straight BD player. But getting two products for the price of a TV is really an attractive offer. Of the 90% Blu-ray player share, for the week ending Jan. 12, the leading brands were Sony at 35%, Panasonic at 27% and Sharp at 23%. Unless I'm totally missing it as I comb through the ads of late, I have not seen many similar Toshiba TVs bundled with free HD DVD players.  For HD DVD, they seem to be primarily sticking with bundling free software with purchase of any Toshiba player. Looking at this week's Ken's Crane ad, the '$225 in Free HD DVDs!' isn't as compelling to me as the mention of 'Get this Sharp BD-HP20 BD player free with purchase of any Sharp 1080p LCD TV!' True, Sharp is likely not making as much of a bottom line return on its product as Toshiba by pushing its BD player basically as a loss leader. But Toshiba HD DVD players are in more of an underdog position than ever before post-Warner. Toshiba needs to be doing big and crazy things to get people's attentions.  Something more than just price cuts, which we've seen plenty of times before.

 

Posted by Susanne Ault on January 23, 2008 | Comments (1)