With the holiday shopping season fast approaching, the manufacturers of Blu-ray and HD DVD are going to be competing for your money. In fact they are going to go to great lengths to entice you into supporting their platform. I just read that Wal-mart is going to be offering a sale special for an HD DVD player for $100 which is plain amazing. The player that is offered is already replaced by a newer model so it is somewhat outdated, but nevertheless it is amazing. The nearest Blu-ray player that I have seen is at least $400 (perhaps the Playstation is cheaper now?).

The subject of this post is not the price of the players though, it is the price of the discs. I just search Wal-mart and most of the HD titles are $19.87 to $22.87 with quite a few in the $25.87 (Dazed & Confused?) to $31.67 (Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift and Fearless). I compared this to Amazon where prices ranged from $19.95 (The Fifth Element) to $21.95 (Pirates of the Caribbean: Black Pearl) to $27.95 (Bulletproof Monk - take that Jet Li!).

According to all of the hype and hoopla surrounding the competing formats, Blu-ray holds more data and is the more technically advanced of the two formats. The main advantage of HD DVD was that existing manufacturing systems could upgrade more easily to HD DVD and it would take less time and money to upgrade. This should translate into lower HD DVD prices though, shouldn't it? I did not find a large price difference in BD vs HD title prices so this argument does not seem to hold. More likely, BD manufacturers are reducing title prices to compete with HD manufacturers are making (a little?) extra money in production costs.

The bottom line is though... the bottom line. The format war is about money (for them, not you silly!) and it will be waged through marketing and (corporate) politics. This is not Betamax redux however, as soon as economical players that support both formats are available the "format war" will simmer down (but not go away entirely thanks to the corporate politics).