Wal-Mart has unveiled that it will sell a $78 Magnavox Blu-ray player on Black Friday, the cheapest retail price for a BD player this year, undercutting Meijer’s $89 Sylvania Black Friday promotion.
Notably however, neither the Magnavox or the Sylvania models are BD-Live compliant, and will lack Web features such as Netflix-streaming, which is available via Best Buy’s $99 Insignia model, which should be the best deal available if the $20 higher price tag is not a deal breaker.
Wal-Mart will also have $9.99 Blu-ray titles such as The Dark Knight, Wanted, Fast and Furious and all the Harry Potter films. For those who have not moved to HD, standard DVDs will be on sale for $1.99 including movies such as Casino Royale, Hellboy II, I Am Legend, Blood Diamond, Underworld and Spaceballs.
For new releases, Star Trek and G.I. Joe will sell for $8.99, extremely cheap for movies that were released in the last month.
On the gaming front, the company is offering a $299 PS3 bundle that also includes the new games Batman Arkham Asylum and Infamous, as well as Dark Knight on Blu-ray.
Result for: undercut
Mark Wattles, the former founder of Hollywood Video and current owner of Mark’s Video rental chains in Washington, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona has announced across the board price drops on rentals via his stores.
Per night prices for rentals have been dropped to $1.49 USD for Blu-rays, $0.99 for new release DVDs and $0.49 for catalog films, prices that match or even undercut rental kiosk giant Redbox.
VideoBusiness has confirmed the new aggressive price drops.
Wattles currently owns 20 locations which were spun off from Hollywood Video when it was purchased by Movie Gallery.
Result for: undercut
The decently popular website Play.com has begun offering high quality, DRM-free MP3 music downloads for the relatively low price of 65p in the UK, and the company says it will start with about one million tracks from EMI and indie labels.
The files, which will be 320kbps, should be playable on most if not all media devices on the market, due to its MP3 format. Apple already offers EMI tracks DRM-free as well but in AAC format which is mainly supported by its iPod line. The price is also cheaper and a Play.com spokesperson has said that “we’re going to be cheaper than [Apple's] iTunes. Whatever price iTunes goes down to, we’ll be looking to go lower.”
In a recent decision, the EU has told Apple it must standardize its prices across Europe and so the tracks are expected to drop from its high 79p current price.
Play.com should also see competition from Amazon MP3 which already undercuts Apple’s track prices and offers DRM-free music from all major labels. So far Amazon MP3 is only in the US but it will hit the UK later this year.
The company says it is talking to the other major labels, “and if one or more had been quicker we might have held off the launch. We think that within the year, the others will be on board.”
