Well, In a NYTimes story
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A $299 Sony Blu-ray Player, but No Cheap Chinese Models
By Saul Hansell
Blu-ray
Stan Glascow, the president of Sony Electronics, held his semi-annual update today in New York, and there were a few new tidbits.
He was, predictably, bullish on the fate of the Blu-ray disc format, now that Sony’s technology has won against Toshiba’s HD-DVD. He acknowledged that the company now has to convince people they need to upgrade their DVD players .
He talked of a slow steady decline in the prices of Blu-ray players, which Sony now sells for $399 and up. He said that prices will fall to $299 for this Christmas and may be under $200 by the end of 2009. Sony isn’t the only one that makes Blu-ray players; Sharp, Samsung and other big electronics companies also compete with Sony.
Mr. Glasgow expressed hope that price levels wouldn’t collapse the way they did for DVD players. To protect against this, he said the Blu-ray Association, the group that controls the Blu-ray standard, has not licensed it to any manufacturers in China. (Cheap players from China were a large part of the collapse of the DVD player market.)
“Will there be Chinese players? Yes,” he said. “We don’t need to drive that and hand the technology over” any time soon, he said.
Mr. Glasgow also said that he didn’t see the market for Blu-ray undercut by movie downloads in the next few years. Given the speed of most home Internet connections in the United States, downloading a movie still takes hours, he said. Discs, moreover, are still popular because people can hold them and give them to others.
“People like owning packaged media,” he said. “Downloading will build over time, but it could take ten years for significant penetration.”
That said, Sony is working on a initiatives to enable customers to download video programs on to a variety of devices including PlayStation game consoles, some Bravia televisions, and the next generation of Blu-ray players that will include an Internet connection.
He confirmed reports that supply of L.C.D. panels for televisions will be in short supply this year, keeping prices firm. Sony, he said, has contracts in place to assure the supply it needs.
As for the dicey state of the economy, Mr. Glasgow expressed optimism, noting that Sony aims at higher price points favored by more affluent buyers. Nonetheless, the company is trying to reduce the amount of inventory it has in its supply chain so it can respond quicker to fluctuations in demand.
“We think the Sony brand holds up well during difficult economic times,” he said
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Basicly, since no Chinese manufacturer joined the BD group in the beginning, the group sees no immediate need to let them flood the market with cheap BD players since they put no investment in the developing the product line. Since the Chinese has been making noise of an alternate tech product, I think everyone is saying " Go head, proof it!" and the media partners have issues with the Chinese piracy. .
Plus, if everyone thinks back to when the Chinese flood the DVD market with cheap players, the failure rate of the players were extremely high in the beginning. Blue lasers are cheaper now, but still more limited than red, so a lot of marginal designs could hurt consumer market plus drive up supplies cost of the blue diode.
And with the world economics carving up manufacturing profits and energy supplies becoming more expense; more international companies are reviewing "risk" concerns about assets beginning nationalized in foreign countries.