Hi there! First time here? Feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you like what you read, you can vote for me on IrishBlogs.info. Thanks for visiting!
The DVD Dossier blog reports:
ASDA, a British supermarket chain owned by U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart, will offer its customers a DVD player for only £9 (just under US $18.00). ASDA, which has recently begun a big push behind low priced electronics, as have its supermarket rivals Tesco and Sainsbury’s, says the unit is “Britain’s lowest priced DVD player.” (The player previously sold in ASDA stores for nearly twice the price, £17.84.)Electronics and media have long been exorbitantly priced on the UK High Street, with TVs, DVD players, computers, CDs, DVDs and software significantly more expensive than the same items purchased overseas.
So selling this unit in the supermarket alongside a jug of wine and a loaf of bread should have quite an impact… at least for a couple of days.
ASDA says 80,000 of the DVD players - manufactured in China under their Durabrand label - are available in all of their 316 stores (and seven ASDA Living stores) throughout the UK and Northern Ireland. The company says it expects the DVD player to sell out within two days.
Peter Pritchard, the supermarket chain’s general merchandise trading director, said in a prepared statement, “This is such a jaw-droppingly low price that customers might struggle to believe it, but we really are selling a DVD player for under a tenner.”
To which we can only add: when the price of the hardware is lower than the price of a new DVD release, we’ve truly reached the age of the disposable DVD player.
Meanwhile, Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, announced at the World Economic Forum that not only will YouTube ensure that license holders, as in record comanies, etc., will receive notification when copyrighted audio is used in YouTube videos, but they will soon start sharing revenue with its users. This speech is, of course, on YouTube for all to see.
He also said their revenue system would “reward creativity” and confirmed that the system would be rolled out in a couple of months and use a mixture of advertisements, including short clips shown ahead of the actual film (annoying?… bad for YouTube and online video communities in general?) I wonder if this would be happening were it not for Google now owning them…
