Best Buy Willing to Pay for YOUR Mistake?

image from www.bestbuy.com

via CNN Tech

HD-DVD has recently met its end, and many customers who jumped the gun and went with HD-DVD in recent months feel jipped.  Best Buy, one of the nation’s largest electronics retailers, will be giving away $50 US gift-cardsto any customers that have recently purchased an HD-DVD player from them.  CNN estimates this will cost the company upwards of $10 Million US.  So what’s the catch? 

Best Buy also has an HD-DVD player trade-in programthat allows customers to turn in “gently used” HD-DVD players in exchange for gift-cards.

Why on earth is Best Buy just giving away gift-cards like this? Well, with HD-DVD’s recent demise, release of new Blu-Ray features, and the BDA refusing to license Blu-Ray to Chinese manufacturers, prices of current and future Blu-Ray players are on the rise. 

So Best Buy feels that consumers will turn around and use the gift-cards on the more expensive Blu-Ray players.  With the great disparity in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray player price, Best Buy is expecting to make up on the $10 Million US hit in no time.

I guess it’s more like you will be paying for HD-DVD’s mistakes.  Thanks Toshiba.

Ten Years? More Like Ten Months: BD+ Cracked

 

If you’ve recently tried to watch a new release Blu-Ray title, you might have come across some compatibility issues – mainly resulting from the latest anti-pirating ploy by Sony known as BD+.  While many of the older Blu-Ray players have trouble supportingthis highly encrypted form of copyright protection, most frustration has come from enthusiasts looking to make backups of these discs.  A Blu-Ray movie can cost anywhere from $20 to $50 US, so it makes sense that people would want to protect the originals and make a copy – fingerprints and scratches can only be ignored by the player for so long.  To combat this, Sony released BD+, and their analysts claimed BD+ would not be cracked for 10 years

Well. 10 months would have been a more realistic prediction.  Slysoft, an Antigua based software company best known for their highly successful program AnyDVD- a program that removes existing copyright protection and other user-unfriendly features of today’s digital discs – has cracked BD+.  AnyDVD HD now has the ability to decrypt BD+, meaning that users who wish to play or copy their BD+ Blu-Ray dics (all of FOX’s recent movies, for example) can do so on their computer for a small fee. 

Sony has yet to respond, but with each new user-unfriendly feature they implement into Blu-Ray, expect companies like Slysoft to work hard for the consumer, like they have today.  Well done Slysoft, well done.