Sony, LG, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba accused of price fixing

[steverhcp02]

nordlead said:

steverhcp02 said:

nordlead said:
well, I know they were price fixing the Blu-ray drives for a while. They refused to let the cheapo Chinese manufacturers make and sell their own models.

The only thing I can't figure out, is why are these small retailers complaining instead of people who actually want to make a drive for cheap and sell it. My only guess is that they are stocking $60-80 DVD drives and people don't want to pay for it they want something cheaper.

That had nothing to do with price fixing and everything to do with standards of manufacturing. There were and are certain requirements that grow and voted upon through the BDA including profile views 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3. This includes BonusVIew and BD Live. These standards were rolled out and the BDA, which is actually mor ePanasonic if im not mistaken then Sony, but the entire BDA vote son regulations to use they Blu-ray Disc image and brand.

The "cheapo" chinese manufacturers would have put out lossy audio, players with no profile views and they were th eone who refused to play by the standards set by the BDA not the other way around.

you mean price fixing. They were putting out blu-ray players at the time that had no extra memory so they couldn't even use those features. All they had to do was say impliment everything but instead they said no cause we don't think you'll do it. At the time they didn't even allow Vizio to make blu-ray players and they make some of the best equipment but undercut the other guys buy quite a bit. Besides, they finally did allow the liscense so obviously it wasn't that big a deal, but the held out to keep prices high.

You can defend them all you want, but the BDA is in no way a good group of people. They rushed their crap onto the market so they could compete with HD-DVD then put out 1.2 & 1.3 so people would have to upgrade if they bought a 1.1 player that didn't have a powerful enough processor. The only reason I bought a blu-ray player was because they killed HDDVD.

No, the profiles were progressing and there were dates set to require newly produced players to be 1.2 and 1.3.  It wasnt the intent to get double buys on players base don profiles but when these companies have that much invested it was important to get the product out as soon as possible...thats not the topic at hand, the topic at hand is whethee or not they were deliberately keeping prices inflated.....and during a format war the fact you think they would risk such a thing when Toshiba had weekly firesales at artifically low prices just to compete is laughable.

And for th elife of me i cant understand how you can say they price fixed during a format war and still won. And calling BD crap in light of HD DVD is fucking laughable just like the lossy audio and terrible codecs that my Blu-rays had to suffer to equal the lowest common denominator of HD DVD when HD DVD was still limping around.