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LG
LG also confirmed several times during 2006 that they had no plans for a universal
player “the future DVD hardware plans was not yet defined”, the company said.
In March 2006, LG said that the players in both formats they planned for release
later in 2006 will not be released, instead, the company is planning to develop a
dual-format player and release it in late summer/early fall “in light of the uncertainty
in this early stage of the market for pre-recorded high-definition optical discs”, LG’s
VP Bob Perry said.
LG also announced in Mar 06 and later again in the year, their support for HD DVD,
without dropping their support for Blu-ray. LG expected to announce the first HD
DVD product in late 2006, its European president James Kim told Reuters on CeBit in
Hanover, Germany. "We will do both," Kim said.
LG confused the market and the consumer expectations by issuing intermittent
yes/no announcements of a universal player at several events over 2006, taking
many by surprise by actually announcing at CES 2007 that a universal player will be
available in 4 weeks.
However, the LG’s universal player, announced to become available in Feb 07 for
$1200 (the BH100), was quoted as having licensing issues with the DVD Forum due
to its inability to fully support HD DVD’s interacivity standard iHD developed by
Microsoft, which would disallow the use of the HD DVD logo on the player and on
advertising, and, Microsoft said, if LG uses the HD DVD logo on the player, the DVD
Forum would have to press charges against LG. LG did not respond to my inquiry.
The Universal Confusion
LG’s universal player must have been in production long before the company
repetitively indicated “no plans” for a universal player, otherwise it could not have
been on the street the first week of February 2007.
LG’s contradictory announcements for over a year convey an image of lack of trust to
company statements, and although I am not a journalist, I would rather not
disseminate any analysis based on information provided by LG, because it could
create more confusion and uncertainty than not saying anything at all.
Although the company stated that the creation of the universal player had the
consumer in mind, after witnessing the several conflicting announcements, it is
rather obvious that the company was actually looking for a profit out of the confusion
of the format war.
Charging consumers $1200 for their player does not actually help consumers,
considering that the only thing consumers would have to do is wait until one format
drops out of the war due to insufficient sales or pushed down by price competition.
At the end of the war, a top-of-the-line player from the winning format would have
then a relative cost of probably even less than half of the price of the universal
player. A consumer buying into the universal product for the sense of a safe choice
would have actually wasted a large part of the investment, because the other format
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