Over at TWICE we see a report on the Sony Electronics’ semi-annual press roundtable with president Stan Glasgow, with a couple of topics touched upon that are of interest to us.

Blu-ray player prices should hit $299 by the end of the year and probably $200 by 2009. Glasgow estimated that there will be 5 million standalone players sold this year worldwide with 75 to 80 percent sold in the United States. And as for HD broadband downloads, “it will happen, but it won’t derail a packaged format for a decade.”

While the Blu-ray format war may be over “the battle really begins now to move people away from DVD to Blu-ray,” Glasgow said. “We have a lot of work to do now, so we are not gloating. Upscale DVD players have gotten better and better. We need to explain the additional feature sets, PIP, BD live and other features.” He added that Sony “will build as many Blu-ray decks as we can.”

It is interesting that he touts the features that HD DVD has had all along and not readily available on Blu-ray right now as the features that differentiate Blu-ray from upconverting DVD players!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Milestones, Players. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.