Friday, February 01, 2008

Circuit City Denies Siding With Blu-ray


I was hoping that today would be a Circuit City-free news day. For the last week this blog has felt like one big Circuit City, HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray lovefest, and I was hoping to give it a rest and talk about something else for a while.

However, Circuit City has vehemently denied the rumor I was irresponsibly circulating earlier this week that they were unloading their HD-DVD hardware preparatory to throwing their weight behind Blu-ray, so I need to report on it.

PunchJump: Circuit City to back HD DVD; clearance 'inadvertent'


Circuit City stores will continue to sell HD DVD products at retail amid a recent clearance of stand-alone players at select locations.
A representative told Punch Jump Wed. that Circuit City will continue sale of Toshiba Corp.'s
HD-A3 HD DVD player at $149 and the HD-A30 at $199.
The clearance of third-generation HD DVD players was said to be inadvertent.


I don't know what's worse, that they're publically stil giving HD-DVD legs, or that their store level operations are out of control.

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2 comments:

waghdude said...

It's not really your fault for giving that story legs, since people even posted pictures of clearance tags.

I think what happened is that they're clearing out older boxes of the third-gen HD DVD players which contained Warner's 300 in them, with new boxes that contain a replacement title. I read on the AVS forum that people have seen these new boxes show up at Costco.

In a sense, it is a "clearance" but the timing probably caused people to jump to the wrong conclusion about how widespread.

Congrats to you for having the integrity to follow-up with this. Most writers who report on bad news about HD DVD rarely publish any of the subsequent retractions or clarifications. I'm sure this principle applies to more than just HD DVD.

Lee_D said...

Thanks for the kind words, waghdude, as well as the further details behind the story.

On a related note, I'm still laughing at the comment over on CE Pro accusing me of having an "undeclared (insidious) anti-BluRay stance"

I'd like to think that I've made a habit of dishing out an equal amount of joshing to both formats, but what do I know?