Tosh to tempt laptop buyers with free HD DVDs
Buy a notebook, get five discs
Want five free HD DVDs? Then hop on over to Toshiba's website and pick one of the manufacturer's HD DVD-friendly laptops. Buy it and the company will send you the discs - worth £75, it said.
To claim your hi-def bounty, you'll need to enter the serial number of your computer on the Toshiba website. The catch is that you can only select your five freebies from a list of 13 titles: Corpse Bride, The Prestige, Troy, Swordfish, Full Metal Jacket, Hulk, Serenity, The Chronicles of Riddick-ulous, The Fast and the Furious 2, Children of Men, World Trade Center, Dreamgirls and Black Rain.
Toshiba's HD DVD laptops include the top-of-the-line Qosmio G40, along with the Satellite Pro A200 and P200, and the Satellites A200, P200 and X200.
Will all these discs count toward the total number of hi-def discs sold in Europe, we wonder? As we've noted before, the European HD DVD Promotion Group won't say how many discs have been purchased or how many players have been bought over here. All it will say is that for every player sold, 3.8 discs have been bought - not exactly a big ratio.
But bigger than the 0.6 discs per player, the group claims for Blu-ray Disc. Still, with PS3 sales so much higher than, we reckon, HD DVD player sales, the BD camp may well be in the lead even so.
Hurry, the offer ends 31 January 2008. Full details here.
COMMENTS
Tough if you already bought one
Very generous, but it's tough titties if you already bought a Tosh laptop with HD DVD, the offer only applies to new sales. Grrr!
Also...
lol @ the Sony fanboi club
Raw deal
So they want ME to help them to get rid of the useless crrp recorded on a useless discs in a useless format and to do it for FREE??? Not only that, but these HD-DVDs will most likely come bundled with Vista-infected useless piece of hardware.
They will have to PAY me to do this.
lol @ Bluray fanboys
I love how when Sony give away free Bluray discs to gain marketshare everything is okay but as soon as the HD DVD group do it suddenly the sky is falling and it's obviously because HD DVD is failing.
If I were a Bluray fanboy I'd be more worried that Sony has gone from claiming victory, to claiming stalemate in the HD format wars, that if anything is the most telling comment right now.
The HD DVD promotion group has woken up to the tactics Sony has employed such as giving away free discs with hardware, paying Blockbuster for Bluray exclusivity and is now playing the same game with their buying off of Paramount and also giving away free discs. As a result the Bluray camp is running scared, especially as HD DVD stand alone players were greater in number than Bluray was even before they started using such tactics. Sony's latest comments about a stalemate only goes to confirm that Bluray isn't holding up quite so well anymore.
How about some good players?
If Toshiba wants to make HDDVD a success, maybe they should sell me a good player. I mean, here in Oz they are still flogging their first generation players for double the price of what they ask for their second generation players in the US.
At $400 I'd buy one in an instant, but paying $800 for an obsolete model is just retarded.
So for now I'll just keep downloading HD movies and playing them from my MacBook Pro via DVI/HDMI into my 720p TV and Toshiba nor the studios make any money. Well done guys.
It's not unusual ..
.. when DVD was new and VHS sales were still strong Panasonic started doing "3 Free DVDs" (Wallace & Gromit, Queen Live and some other bad title) with all DVD Players to try and tempt people away from VHS.
What's so different about Toshiba doing it now ?
