Re: Official Playstation 3 Blu-Ray player Thread
Quote:
what would be the reason for that.
why would sony care if panasonic has bragging rights? |
You know how all of us with the PS3 talk about how it's the "best" BD player because of all it can do and the fact that it will be updated for DTS-HD MA decoding and 2.0 profile... and that it costs just a fraction of what stand-alone players that do the same thing will cost? Sony and all the other manfuacturers know that too, and so Sony purposefully 'holds back' the time-table of some of its updates for the PS3 so other manufacturers can have a chance to market and sell products before the PS3 gets updated and competes for sales based on those features.
Sony is a member of the BDA which is made up of all those other companies making BD players. Neither Sony nor the other BDA members want the potential sales of their new stand-alone players trounced right off the bat by saavy HT consumers just buying the PS3 instead to get the same features for less money. So Sony purposefully "holds back" it's updates for the PS3 to allow other manufacturers of stand-alones to get their hardware out for a month or two to get some sales... then the PS3 releases a firmware update that provides the same featureset.
Toshiba had great hardware at a great price. But the downside was that by undercutting the potential profits of other manufactures, other companies stayed out of the HD DVD hardware game. Sony doesn't want to make that same mistake, they want to ENCOURAGE other manfucturers to make fully featured BD hardware and to turn a profit doing so.
Sony did the same thing BTW with the update for profile 1.1 PIP on the PS3... Panny had released the BD30, which was one of the first profile 1.1 PIP players on the market, for about a month before Sony swung in and released the update to make the PIP profile 1.1 spec too.
That gave Panny room to sell some products and be able to put out marketing material bragging about the exlusive features of their players for a little while before the PS3 offered the same thing for a free update.
No format can be sustained long-term with only one manufacturer producing and supporting hardware, and Sony doesn't want to discourage product development from other manufacturers by negating the profitability of their every effort by releasing updates for the PS3 that trump their product design/release schedule.
