Folks who were wondering whether leading retailers’ decisions to drop the price of Toshiba’s HD-A2 HD DVD player to the neighborhood of $99 this past weekend would have any significant impact on sales have their first signs this morning: long-standing video industry publication Video Business is reporting that retailers moved 90,000 Toshiba HD DVD players over the weekend.
Citing sources “close to the retailers”—including Wal-mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City, and others, but not every retailer offering the players—most of the sales were apparently for the discounted HD-A2 second-generation HD DVD players, although some sales were for the third-generation HD-A3, which Best Buy was offering for $299 over the weekend.
Aside from the Blu-ray equipped PlayStation 3 game console, the best-selling Blu-ray player is the $499 Sony BDP-S300, which has sold about 100,000 units since its introduction in mid-2007. Even with 90,000 players sold over three days, Blu-ray still has the largest base of installed players due to the PlayStation 3 game console.
