Blu-Ray Movies Likely to Hit Market Before Players
Posted Thu Mar 30, 2006 at 12:07 PM PST by
Like any good soap opera, the next-gen DVD format wars continue to deliver surprises. A couple weeks ago, it looked like Toshiba would release the first HD-DVD players pushed back their date so that both releases would coincide).
Now rival Blu-Ray is facing its own new delays, only this time the situation is reversed -- Samsung has announced it likely won't have the market's first Blu-Ray player ready for the format's planned May 23 launch, leaving Sony with its initial batch of movie titles ready to go, but with no hardware to play them on,
reports Home Media Retailing.
Unlike the HD-DVD camp's decision to keep its hardware and software launch coordinated, Sony president of Home Entertainment Benjamin Feingold says having Blu-Ray discs on the market before the players suits the company just fine. "We realize there may be some delays on the hardware side, but we are going to honor our commitment to release movies when we said we would," Feingold told HMR.
Retailers could still opt to hold off on selling Sony's initial batch of Blu-Ray titles -- which includes such hits as '50 First Dates,' 'House of Flying Daggers,' 'Hitch' and 'Resident Evil' -- until hardware arrives.
"There are two schools of thought: A dealer could have them for publicity purposes, to prime the market, or we can ship them later, when hardware is on the market," said Sony's Feingold. "It creates a great opportunity for us to author more titles and have more software available at launch.".