| GodofWine said: Anyone care to cook up a guess as too how future profitability of Sony will be impacted by their use of the PS3 to win the High Def. DVD format war? There has to be a value on that, some amount of the 'loss per unit' had to be calculated not only in payback from peripherals and software, but also is a generation of Blu Ray sales. I think this may be a big picture thing for them. |
Its difficult to measure the benefit from the Blu-Ray victory. Right now the Blu-Ray consortium have spent hundreds of millions of dollars (if not Billions of dollars) in marketing Blu-Ray and getting exclusivity contracts from major movie studios. It will take years for these costs to be recovered, and until they are none of the members are going to see much in the way of revenues from licencing costs.
Now, if you assume similar licencing fees for Blu-Ray that currently exist for DVD you're (probably) talking about $5 per Blu-Ray player and $1 per Blu-Ray movie (in particular after they have paid for the technology licencing); remember, these licencing fees have to be low enough that (eventually) the players can be sold for $20, and a movie can be sold at $10, at a profit for the manufacturer and retailer. Sony is not the only person who would make money from these licencing fees, and I would be surprised if they made 25% of the total.
In other words I would be surprised if Sony made 1/2 the money they lost on the PS3 back from Blu-Ray licencing ...
Now there are other ways that a HD format benefits Sony, like the sales of high-end electonics and being able to re-sell old movies, but these are difficult to measure and Sony would have received these benefits regardless of what format won.
