KEY POINTS:
I went to a friend's barbeque last week which put on for the neighbours in her apartment complex here in central Wellington. Midway through the proceedings, the neighbours all decided to give a guided tour of each others' apartments, seeing as they all had similarly laid out homes but wanted to know how people had decorated them.
I walked through numerous apartments and while widely differing tastes and styles were evident in the interior decorating and furniture, there was one common theme - everyone had a flat-screen TV, 32 inches or larger.
There were all makes and models - Panasonic and Samsung, Sony and Philips, a couple of them capable of displaying full high-definition (1080p) images. But there wasn't a single high-definition player in sight - no Blu-ray or HD-DVD drives.
While HD technology has been in the market here a year now, it really hasn't gained any traction. Thousands of Kiwis have bought a Blu-ray drive by default with the Playstation 3, but I doubt many people are using them.
At $49.95 for a new release high-definition movie title, I don't blame them. While it appears the likes of Video Ezy are stocking more Blu-ray rental discs than HD-DVD, there isn't a huge selection yet.
Across the Tasman, Video Ezy and Blockbuster have told the HD-DVD alliance it is 'missing the boat'
and isn't taking the Australian market seriously enough supplying not enough titles or players.
"Without meaning to be disrespectful, it's probably how they see this territory in terms of their bottom line," Paul Uniacke, managing director of the Franchise Entertainment Group, which owns Video Ezy and Blockbuster in Australia, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
The situation is even worse here as the posts in this forum indicate.
While there are a number of Blu-ray players on the market, Dick Smith is selling the Panasonic player for $1429 and the Sony one for $1299.
The much-touted cut-price Toshiba HD-DVD player, the Toshiba HD-E1 HD DVD player, is selling for $1099. Across the Tasman it sells for A$499 after an A$100 rebate.
I rang Harvey Norman and enquired about the HD-E1. It's not in stock and when it will be, hopefully in the next week or two it will sell for a recommended retail price of $1199 "with some free discs". Why the big premium over what Australians pay?
"Different pricing mate, there may be some discounting," the salesman at Harvey Norman told me.
That puts Paul Uniacke's comments above into perspective. Outside of the video game console market where you can get a PS3 with Bluray drive for $799 and an Xbox 360 and HD-DVD bundle (Xbox 360 HD-DVD bundle for around $850, there's not much on offer in the way of attractively-priced HD hardware.
That's a missed opportunity for a technology that's struggling to gain traction, because if there is any time to prepare the market for HD next year when we'll get our first high-definition broadcasts on Freeview and Sky TV, it's now, in the run-up to Christmas.
